In what may seem like a silly undertaking, Sun Microsystems is setting out to quantify the carbon footprint of e-mail. It seems obvious, the carbon footprint of e-mail as long as it’s not printed out (if you haven’t already done so, add this tag to the bottom of your e-mail signature: Please consider the environment before printing the contents of this email) is less than many other forms of communication. Even if you account for the energy use of the computers involved, it is still much less than that of fax or snail mail. In the case of faxes, there is the paper and toner, as well as the electricity used by the machines and with snail mail you have paper, ink and transportation related emissions. E-mail is clearly much better, so why should Sun spend its time proving that?

This apparent exercise in futility, however, could have some very positive impact for one simple reason -- IT equipment is an energy hog. Or as we like to say in the business, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There is the manufacturing of the equipment, which can be heavy in resource and energy use. There is the transportation of the equipment, with parts being sourced from all over the world, and sometimes in unethical ways. There is what happens to the equipment when it becomes obsolete: are the parts recycled or relegated to landfill? And then there is keeping the data servers in temperature controlled locations.

Here's something I learned at the Hollywood Goes Green event -- 50% of the cost of a data center is to keep the room cool. According to Information Week, “In the United States the power consumption in 2005 for servers and related equipment in data centers was equivalent to about five 1,000-megawatt power plants, or your five typical nuclear or coal power plants.” Globally, we are talking about the annual equivalent of 14 power plants. That’s a lot of energy.

Data centers are excellent candidates for solar energy installation, as the savings, financially and in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, could be immediate. If my notes are correct, Rich Lechner of IBM and Ric Pepe of Copan Storage were throwing out numbers as high as $2 -- $3 billion in energy costs for data centers at the Hollywood Goes Green event. If Sun can demonstrate that the bulk of the carbon emissions and cost from e-mail is generated by the IT equipment, there will be further incentive to create more energy efficient models, more energy efficient manufacturing practices, and to rethink energy sources for data centers. True, data centers are about far more than e-mail, but shining a spotlight on the entire IT field and its potential for improvement can only be a good thing. And with daily e-mail use being universal and numbering in the billions, the connection between e-mail capabilities and IT choices is no small thing. Just ask any company that has had its e-mail server go down on a Monday morning.

Everyone fully expects that Sun will demonstrate that e-mail is far better for the environment than other forms of written communication, but they may also prove that we can still do better. And in a way that is good for the environment and good for the consumer.