Green Wombat

photo: IBM

As spring approaches, the greening of Corporate America continues
apace. First financial services giant Citi (C) this week unveiled a $50 billion green investment initiative and today IBM (IBM) said it will spend a billion a year to green energy-hogging data centers. The Big Green project will deploy 850 "energy efficiency architects" to evaluate electricity usage in its data centers and those of its clients and then use a mix of hardware and software technologies to cut power consumption by 42 percent. That will eliminate an estimated 7,439 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, according to IBM. The tech giant said the Big Green initiative will allow it to double computing capacity without spiking energy usage or increasing CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, California utility PG&E (PCG) said today it’s working with IBM to slash electricity consumption in its West Coast data centers by 80 percent. The utility will accomplish that in part by replacing Unix 300 servers with six IBM System p5 servers. Use of IBM’s virtualization software will increase the server’s utilization from 10 percent of capacity to more than 80 percent while a water-cooling technology will cut heat emissions from the servers by 60 percent.

Citi, the financial services multinational formerly called Citigroup, has pledged to spend up to $50 billion over the next decade to invest in renewable energy and other green technologies. That pile of cash includes $10 billion Citi (C) previously promised expend on efforts to combat global warming. Upping the ante over Bank of America’s (BAC) $20 billion green lending program announced in March, Citi says it will spend $10 billion to cut greenhouse gas emissions from its global operations by 10 percent by 2011. But the bulk of the cash – $31 billion – will go for investments in geothermal, solar, wind and other renewable energy projects and technologies. (Citi, for example, is financing Portuguese utility EDP’s $2 billion takeover of Horizon Wind Energy, the largest wind farm company in the United States. Citi has also invested in Indian wind energy company Suzlon.) The willingness of banks to finance big renewable energy projects will be crucial to the success of current plans to build utility-scale solar power plants in California and the Southwest. California utilities, for instance of contracted for nearly 2 gigawatts of solar power, but financing the plants, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, remains a big hurdle.

In another sign of Wal-Mart’s power to put the economy on a more sustainable path, the retail giant today said it is working with light bulb makers GE (GE), Royal Philips (PHG),  Osram Sylvania and Lights of America to slash the mercury content of high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs by an average 33 percent. Mercury is a toxic substance and its use in CFLs presents a conundrum for the widespread adoption of light bulbs that use 70 percent less electricity than traditional incandescent lighting: will using CFLs to lower greenhouse gases  create a hazardous waste nightmare? Others worry that consumers will be less likely to buy CFLs if they can’t just toss them in the rubbish bin when they burn out – though the bulbs’ lifespan is about 10 years. Wal-Mart (WMT) has committed to selling 100 million CFLs by 2008 and it also has launched a campaign to work with its suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of their manufacturing processes. The light bulb manufacturers will reduce the mercury content of their CFLs as much as 50 percent below the 5 milligram per bulb standard set by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. “People concerned about the environment and their health can buy these CFLs with a clear conscience,” said Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist  Noah Horowitz in a statement released by Wal-Mart. The retailer also cited U.S. EPA stats that found that a coal-fired power plant emits four times the mercury to power an incandescent bulb than a CFL.