AT&T is targeting aggressive reduction of the amount of energy its infrastructure consumes in 2011. The company's data centers are a big piece of the puzzle, and it has set a goal to improve their energy efficiency by 17%, while compute-capacity requirements for its internal business grow 20% in 2011.

The global telecom and technology service provider has set a goal to reduce total power its data centers consume by 1.8m kWh in 2011, according to the company's newly released corporate sustainability report for 2010.

AT&T chief sustainability officer Charlene Lake said in a statement, 2010 was the first year the company started seeing tangible results of its investment in sustainability for the past several years. "We'll continue to build upon this momentum and seek more shared value opportunities for business and society," she added.

AT&T exceeded its goal of reducing electricity consumption by 16% in 2010 as it relates to data growth on its network. The company used 415kWh per terabyte of data the network carried ÔÇô a 16.6% decrease from 2009.

Its new goal is to reduce the amount of energy it takes to carry digital information by 17% from 2010. One of the ways it plans to meet this goal is to include energy goals in corporate real estate employees' review scorecards.

AT&T's another approach to the energy issue is target $40m in cost savings associated with reducing energy consumption. The 17% improvement in data center energy efficiency is one of the ways the company is planning to tackle this goal.

Another new goal for 2011 is to demonstrate the ability of data center energy efficiency, driven by adoption of cloud computing, to help cut emissions and help achieve business benefits.