IT Solutions to Help Texas Save Energy

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Earlier today I had the chance to present to the Texas House of Representatives Committee on House Administration about energy-efficiency.  The committee’s Chairman, Representative Tony Goolsby, is actively looking at ways to make the Texas State Capitol building more energy-efficient and asked us to share our experiences.  The House Administration Committee’s first charge from the full House of Representatives was to “Study and make recommendations with assistance from the State Energy Conservation Office on ways to conserve electricity and water in the Texas State Capitol.”  As a Texas citizen, and a taxpayer, I’m thrilled to see our state legislature taking action.

It’s a great example of how important it is for business and government to work together in meeting our shared environmental challenges and opportunities.  Energy costs are on the rise across the globe and what the Texas state government is experiencing is no different than what many of our customers are.

The key message I left with the committee is that information technology is part of the solution, not part of the problem. IT makes solutions like virtualization, telecommuting and increased productivity possible.  I shared some of our results, many of which you’ve read about in this forum, including our recent move to make our headquarters campus run on green power and the energy-efficiency improvements we’ve implemented in our own facilities that are saving us millions of dollars in energy costs per year.  I also shared with the Committee the Connected Era publication.

We’ll continue to see out ways to partner with customers, governments and stakeholders as we find ways to make energy-use more efficient.  And we’ll provide products that deliver the most performance per watt to help all of our customers, just last week we announced a goal to increase the energy-efficiency of our desktop and laptop products by an additional 25 percent.  Our efforts are paying off, we estimate that power-management features on our desktop products have already saved customers more than $2.4 billion in energy costs and avoided 23 million tons of CO2.

About the Author: Dane Parker

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