WASHINGTON, DC — In honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the federal government's Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, laid out how government IT is going green as a way of saving energy and money.

A number of technologies will come into play to help curb overprovisioning and underutilization of IT systems. Kundra said that federal agencies use just 6 percent of their infrastructure, and that the number of government-owned data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to over 1,100 by 2009.

Many of those facilities also reported seasonal spikes in demand, meaning that the data centers are built to accomodate the highest demand, even if that demand only lasts for days or weeks out of the year. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, sees a major spike in demand around the April 15th tax deadline, but uses much less IT for the rest of the year.

Among the tech solutions Kundra laid out as steps to cut the energy used by the federal government are cloud computing, remote work, and data center consolidation.

Migrating computing services to the cloud rather than physical offices would free up employees to work remotely, cutting down energy and emissions from commuting and allow for more flexible data needs. Kundra used the U.S. Patent and Trade Office as an example of the benefits of telework: Up to half of that agency's staff works remotely.

Kundra's plans, as reported by NextGov, follow on an executive order issued by President Obama in October 2009 that laid out how the federal government should work toward more sustainable practices.

As managing editor Matthew Wheeland wrote last year, the executive order spells out several big impacts for green IT:

... Obama's order lays out a handful of additional requirements designed to save costs and cut waste in the government. From Section 2 (i) of the order:

(i) ensuring procurement preference for EPEAT- registered electronic products;
(ii) establishing and implementing policies to enable power management, duplex printing, and other energy-efficient or environmentally preferable features on all eligible agency electronic products;
(iii) employing environmentally sound practices with respect to the agency's disposition of all agency excess or surplus electronic products;
(iv) ensuring the procurement of Energy Star and FEMP designated electronic equipment;
(v) implementing best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers.

In addition to that laundry list of the low-hanging fruit for green IT, Section 2 b. of the executive order also encourages agency staff to look to alternatives to traditional commuting and business travel; while far from explicit, the section does seem to support the idea of more telework and virtual meetings through telepresence technologies.

_{Photo CC licensed by Flickr user freshwater2006.}