It may turn out, as we've been saying for months, that the economic meltdown could be green IT's best friend.

According to a new study from Deloitte and CFO Research, by the end of this year, as many as two-thirds of all large companies may have put in place strategies for making their tech departments more environmentally and energy friendly. As of this year, 32 percent of the respondents said their firms have a formal green IT program in place, while another 34 percent said their companies would have such a plan in place by the end of 2009.

The report, "The Next Wave of Green IT," explores the role that IT can play in future corporate sustainability plans by surveying 353 senior finance, IT and business unit executives at companies worth at least $500 million. Although the findings are still a bit of a mixed bag, it does suggest that cost savings, coupled with environmental savings that may or may not be business risks depending on where in the world your company is located, is helping to drive awareness and acceptance of green IT. And companies are also starting to dedicate serious green to their green IT plans: the survey found that almost 60 percent of these companies plan to spend at least 5 percent of their budgets on green IT projects -- and over a third put that number at 15 percent of the budget.

If that 66 percent figure for overall green IT plans comes to pass by the end of 2009, it will match up with overall environmental strategies in place: two-thirds of the respondents said their companies have a plan in place for monitoring their total corporate-wide environmental performance. But the idea of green IT as a cost-savings measure as much if not more than an environmental impact measure is certainly helping to drive adoption.

The authors of the report write, "While all of these efforts [including energy-efficient hardware, virtualization strategies and streamlined system integrations] have a green aura to them -- which is certainly positive -- many of these improvements contribute directly to the bottom line, doubling their appeal."

The report includes some real-world examples of strategies companies have successfully adopted to make their IT departments work smarter and more efficiently. Among the examples is Intel's use of waste heat from servers being redirected to warm the company's cafeteria, a new policy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fast-track forms that are submitted electronically rather than on paper, and the cooling efficieny gains Wells Fargo has received from controlling its servers to the microlevel.

Not all is well for the the world of green IT, of course; the report did find evidence of a significant gap between IT and finance executives, which can help to hide the costs from inefficient IT platforms and slow environmental progress. Depending on job duties, between 40 and 60 percent of executives surveyed said they are lacking "complete, timely and accurate" information on the environmental impact of their IT department.

The full report is available for download from www.deloitte.com/us/nextwavegreenit.