Website: Forrester.com/GreenIT

This tool from Doug Washburn at Forrester Research walks you through the key green IT baseline assumptions, including the number of IT assets, energy draw, and hours of up-time. It also allows you to customize your price and CO2 emissions per kilowatt for additional accuracy.

The tool will then automatically calculate your green IT baseline for your review. From there, you can email the results to yourself for future reference (and you can also help guide Forrester's research agenda).

Among the reasons to start measuring your baseline:

• Guide your greening efforts with solid data. Avoid guessing about what to green first by referencing concrete statistics on energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and cost per IT asset.
• Create realistic goals. Measuring IT's energy consumption will help you estimate the possible environmental and economic benefits of going green, ensuring your green-related goals are realistic.
• Quantify the benefits over time. Once you have implemented green upgrades to your IT assets, compare your new energy consumption to your baseline, highlighting both environmental and economic savings.

Washburn has also posted a free green IT podcast and report, "Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?" to offer more answers and tips for measuring your green IT baseline.

The calculator is online at Forrester.com/GreenIT.