Global IT giant HP has managed to reduce the amount of energy its operations consumed last year from the year prior. As it completed the integration of a large new business it purchased in 2008, adding 465 sites to its real estate footprint, the company adjusted its goals for CO2-emission reduction. The current goal is to reduce emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2013.

According to the newly published HP Global Citizenship Report 2009, the company's operations resulted in about 1.95 million tons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases - a 10 percent drop from 2008. HP achieved the reduction by both purchasing renewable energy (about 131 million kWh in 2009) and increasing operational energy efficiency.

Sources of greenhouse-gas emissions caused by HP operations

In 2009, the company reduced its overall energy use by nine percent from 2008. The figure includes facilities owned by EDS, the IT outsourcing firm HP bought about two years ago. The total reduction consisted of an eight-percent drop in the company's use of electricity and a 16-percent drop in its use of natural gas.

HP was able to achieve the reductions by decreasing its sites' square footage by nine percent, most of which it attributed to integration of EDS, and a number of corporate initiatives to reduce energy use.
Along with technology upgrades throughout the enterprise and boosting recycling programs, these initiatives included the three-year data center consolidation program that was completed in 2008. The project consolidated 85 internal data centers into six locations in three US cities.

"Overall, by 2009 the project cut our internal IT data centers' energy consumption by 60 percent from 2005 levels," the report read.

HP has the option to expand the six facilities to more than double the current data center space in the future. The company expects one of them, a 35,000-square-foot data center in the Houston, Texas, area to receive LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council.

Besides the six new facilities in Atlanta, Austin and Houston, HP consolidated several computer rooms at its R&D campus in California's Silicon Valley into a single room, reducing associated CO2 emissions by 3,900 tons per year. The California State government issued the company an energy-efficiency award for the project.

HP still has more than 150 externally-facing data centers around the world that serve its customers. In 2010, the company expects to produce a multi-year plan to reduce that number as well.

One of the newest customer-facing data centers is the facility in Wynyard, UK, opened in February.

DatacenterDynamics issued HP the Green Data Center award in 2008 for the energy-efficient design for the Wynyard facility.