Green PCs market will exceed $190 billion by 2013

OYSTER BAY, USA: Personal computers and servers are power hogs that exacerbate growing electrical consumption trends, which results in increased pollution. In addition to the products themselves, the inefficient manufacturing and packaging of these products also adversely impacts the environment by using toxic substances, and/or by not taking advantage of reusable or recycled materials.

The toxic substances used find their way into landfills around the globe (particularly in developing countries in Africa and Eastern Europe), where they can seep into the atmosphere and the ground water supply, creating potential health hazards for humans, animals and plant life.

According to a new study by NextGen Research, “Green Computing: Reducing the Environmental Impact of PCs, Servers By Using Safer Materials, Slashing Power” computer and server vendors are making their products increasingly green.

The newest equipment consumes less electricity than legacy hardware; toxic substances once used in their construction have been replaced with more environmentally friendly materials; and most vendors will take their products back at end of life cycle for reuse/recycling.

As a result, purchases of green desktop and notebook computers and netbooks will grow from less than a sixth ($37 billion) of the $249-billion PC market in 2009, to nearly two-thirds (more than $190 billion) of the $323-billion PC market in 2013.

Servers and data centers also are becoming increasingly green, observes the study’s author, analyst Laura DiDio. “There are practical reasons spurring OEM hardware vendors and their corporate customers to invest in green hardware technologies: vendors want to make money, and corporate enterprises want to save money.

That’s why top-tier desktop and server vendors like such as HP and IBM are introducing new, more-efficient servers that run cooler, consume less power, and still deliver the processing power needed to satisfy the demands of even the most compute-intensive data centers.”

Ms. DiDio notes: “Contrary to popular misconception, a conversion to green PCs and servers does not have to take a big bite out of cash-constrained corporations’ capital budgets. Hardware and semiconductor vendors are building more environmentally friendly chips and hardware that offer better performance, consume less power, run cooler and are competitively priced.”

A properly planned migration to green PCs and servers, she says, “can lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 20-50 percent and allow companies to realize ROI within the first year.”