Race to be green saps creative energy

I had to laugh. Was this new and epic Cabinet split about whether the Home Office really can and should equip the police with personal organisers in time for the 2012 Olympics? Or was it about the reliability of the face recognition software used on those organisers, and the civil liberty questions that they raise?

No. It was neither of those. The row at No 10 was about transport minister Ruth Kelly’s plans to get ministers to use cars that emit less than 120 grams of CO2 per kilometre -­ the level that the European Commission wants right across the EU by 2012. Kelly’s implication: HMG bigwigs must buy the Toyota Pious, not the wicked Jaguar.

How lovely that our leaders row about how best to set an eco-example to the public. Yet for me the episode suggests that hysteria around energy consumption has now reached such absurd heights, it must be crowding out the genuine innovative use of IT.

IT departments put pressure on vendors to build energy-efficient hardware, while facilities managers are likewise obsessed with cutting energy use. Meanwhile, human resources departments add “buying green” to the criteria by which they appraise managers, and fervently hope that the “War against climate terror” will provide every member of staff with a cause to rally around.

There are moves to buy processing-light software, pushes for energy-efficient hardware, concerns about server packaging and disposal, and debate about whether to turn the lights out in datacentres. But do such moves amount to what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described in 1942, in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, as a gale of “creative destruction”?

Optimists would say that a firm’s shift to green IT marks a competition with, and elimination of, rivals not by the old weapons of price, product quality or sales volume, but by what Schumpeter highlighted: innovation. For Schumpeter, the “powerful lever” that lay behind capitalism’s long-term improvements in cheapness and output consisted of new kinds of consumer goods, technologies, markets, sources of supply and forms of organisation.

Some like to think, then, that we’re at the start of one of Schumpeter’s “discrete rushes” of the new. Except that the new is green, and who’s greenest wins. I can’t agree. A gale of uncritical acceptance of energy conservation has certainly overwhelmed IT managers as much as other professionals. There has indeed been a mental revolution. But to save money on the measly £3m that a typical datacentre runs up in annual energy costs is not quite the world-shaking practical achievement that Schumpeter dignified with the phrase “creative destruction”.

Among new US cars, the market share of petrol/electric hybrids, though rising dramatically, is still barely above two per cent. Nevertheless, senior figures in Silicon Valley are now betting on all-electric cars. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, spends millions on developing them, and former SAP president Shai Agassi has raised $200m to build an infrastructure of electric battery-swapping stations.

One day, perhaps, California’s integration of batteries and the IT that controls them will amount to a Schumpeterian tsunami. But does today’s parsimony and breast-beating about power for enterprise IT already amount to the radical reorganisation or actual demise of an old sector, or the emergence of a new one?

Not yet, if at all. It isn’t creative destruction, but rather a narrowing of ambition that characterises today’s fad for green IT.