Short-term thinking by most IT execs is short-changing their employers out of significant energy savings.

Based on a survey of 752 IT professionals, the technology firm CDW Corporation says organizations are wasting millions of dollars on energy costs that could easily be pocketed instead of sending hard-earned dollars to the local utility company.

Looking longer term, this wasteful spending will only mushroom, CDW warns, because energy use by the nation’s data centers is expected to double within two years.

Key problem: The recession forces many IT managers to buy cheaper equipment that is not as energy efficient as better quality products that would save their organizations money in the longer term.

This losing trend can be reversed, CDW Vice President Mark Gambill says, by making IT departments aware of what their energy bills are.

Many companies are ahead of the eight ball. They’re bringing home the Green IT savings by adopting rather simple strategies. CDW’s Energy Efficient IT Report found that those saving money with Green IT programs:

• buy equipment with low-power/low-wattage processors
• use network-based power management tools
• install software tools with uninterrupted power supplies to monitor energy demand and use
• use sensors to turn off lights when rooms are empty
• manage cable placement to reduce air conditioning requirements, and
• use server and storage virtualizaion to reduce the need for on-site power and cooling demand.

By focusing on these strategies, 51% of IT departments reduced their total energy costs by an average $53,000 a year. In the higher education sector, 54% of universities have cut their power costs by 1% or more, for an average of $22,000 a year in savings.

For example, CDW’s report notes that the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC, think tank, cut its energy bill by $58,000 a year by modernizing its computer room. The Institute did it by switching to blade servers, modernizing its cooling system, taking advantage of an energy audit and adopting EPA’s free, power management tool, EZ GPO.

Brookings also gets credit for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 447 tons per year.

CDW’s study can be downloaded here. A summary of the survey results and implications is here.

Tags: Brookings Institution, CDW, energy efficiency, EZ GPO, Green IT