Research firm Gartner predicts that most IT business cases will soon include the cost of carbon emissions – but it believes the most PC carbon emissions will continue to occur before they are even switched on.

 

In its IT forecast for the next decade, Gartner said that currently energy savings helps drive virtualization and desktop power management projects. Incorporating carbon costs into business cases will provide a further measure of savings and will prepare IT groups for increased scrutiny of IT’s carbon impact.

 

It expects that pressure to demonstrate responsibility for CO2 emissions will force more businesses to lay out carbon costs in business cases. By 2014, most IT business cases will cover the carbon costs, it said.

 

“Vendors will have to provide carbon life cycle statistics for their products or face market share erosion,” Gartner said. “Incorporating carbon costs in business cases will only slightly accelerate replacement cycles.

 

“A reasonable estimate for the cost of carbon in typical IT operations is an incremental one or two percentage points of overall costs. Therefore, carbon accounting will more likely shift market share than market size.”

 

Gartner also predicted that by 2012, 60% of a new PC’s “total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.”

 

It said that over the course of its lifetime, a typical PC consumes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels, “but around 80% of a PC's total energy usage still happens during production and transportation.”

Greater awareness among buyers and those that influence buying, greater pressure from eco-labels, increasing cost pressures and social pressure have awoken the IT industry to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

 

“Technology providers should expect that they will be required to provide carbon dioxide emission data to a growing number of customers,” it said.