With all the talk of high energy prices, crashing economies and the need for Corporate Responsibility statements you might expect Green IT to be on the agenda of most boards. Not a chance. In a recent HP survey over 57% of companies said that the only way they would invest in Green IT was if legislation was introduced to mandate it.

Over the last two years we have seen a concerted campaign by IT vendors to drive blade systems, large storage arrays and virtualisation - storage, server and desktop. The benefits of adopting all this new technology is better energy efficiency, better utilisation of hardware and lower costs. Oh, and by the way, you will also meet your corporate responsibility to the environment by being green!

It all sounds marvellous. But there's a catch. One thing that all the marketing messages left out was that in order to do any of this there was the inevitable uptick in IT spending. In basic terms, you have to spend a load of money in order to save money a couple of years down the line. Like all total cost of ownership (TCO) messages, only the savings ever get mentioned and even there, the proof can often be hard to find.

For those companies who were in the process of replacing or buying additional hardware, purchasing highly dense solutions happened at the right time. But what about the rest. Justifying the change of hardware is not easy when budgets are being cut. Even the electricity price hikes of last year were not sufficient to allow many companies to change their purchasing approach and as economies and business confidence crashed, all projects went on hold.

A few weeks ago at CeBIT the Green IT area was rarely busy. People were wandering through but not a lot seemed to be stopping. Even the vendors were not flocking there in large numbers leaving the hall less than fully populated. It appeared that 'green' was about to become another over hyped casualty of the current recession.

Another driver towards green over the last few years has been the threat, especially from the European Commission, of the introduction of carbon trading for the mega datacentres around Europe. There are some who want this threat extended to many of the mid-sized datacentres. This would bring datacentres into line with manufacturing plants. After all, power usage in excess of 2MW in a medium datacentre is about that of a small manufacturing facility.

The European Commission has also been talking about enforcing tighter regulations on datacentres and on IT hardware vendors to get better power efficiency. At the moment, there is a stand-off with a voluntary agreement in place while everyone assesses where we are.

One misleading statistic that has a lot of people worried, is that of carbon generation. The global IT market is credited with producing the same amount of CO2 as the airline industry. However, there are many differences between the two industries which means that you cannot simply take the headline amount of CO2 generation. That hasn't stopped some from trying to use this to push for carbon credits and tougher legislation.

Ian Brooks, UK Head of Innovation and Sustainable Computing, Hewlett Packard says "the recent changes in UK and European legislation (European leaders recently agreed a package of laws aimed at cutting greenhouse gases by one-fifth by 2020) means that companies cannot afford to simply renege on their environmental commitments. With technology equipment responsible for a sizeable percentage of a country’s energy bill (up to 10% in some markets), the onus will inevitably fall on IT departments to help try to meet these carbon reduction targets."