This is the new blue ocean strategy. Find a business/service/product which uses environmental resources (electricity being the biggest one), figure out a way to create new solutions to decrease their resource use and then add the green tag for branding. As an addition, if you can provide measuring systems, you have another revenue source.

The greening of data centers seems to go the same way.

ZdNet Australia has a new article on this space.

Being green, in terms of IT and datacentres, only very superficially has anything to do with saving the environment. In reality it is about cold, hard cash — and how to spend less of it.

CIOs are facing a challenge. There is a relentless demand for more powerful datacentres and the cost of power is increasing. Combine this with increasingly strict environmental laws and the issue becomes clear — IT needs to do more with less electricity.
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In order to meet these energy efficiency challenges, a series of innovations has sprung up, centred on hardware, software and datacentre design. The champion of these innovations is virtualisation.
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Kumar describes a scenario in which a virtualised server moved from performing at 10 to 20 percent of its capacity to more than 80 percent capacity.

“In real power terms, a 300 Watt server which was running at 20 Watts is actually now running at 280 Watts. You are reducing the footprint but putting in more processing power, so the power per footprint has gone up,” Kumar said.

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The sudden rise in green IT has created opportunities for vendors and business to profit from this blossoming market. Recent research from analyst firm Forrester has predicted that the global market for green IT will peak at US$4.8 billion in 2013, and then decline thereafter — as businesses reach peak efficiency.

Analyst group S2 intelligence predicts a potential market in “green accounting“, where firms pay to accurately measure their environmental impact. Such measurement would likely be software based, and would help to satisfy government regulation, customers and trading partners.

New opportunities beckon.