Business opportunities

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	Business opportunities in a low-carbon economy

HP is developing new IT solutions that can help minimize the release of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These low-carbon solutions fall into three broad areas:

Reduce

The first area focuses on improving the efficiency of existing products and services. Advances in information technology (IT) are enabling energy-intelligent appliances and systems that require less energy. As an example, HP recently introduced Dynamic Smart Cooling, a comprehensive approach to reducing the power needed to cool data centers. We are also researching large-scale sensor networks to improve energy efficiency in broader areas such as construction and agriculture.

Advanced modeling tools are making it easier to develop more energy-efficient products, as well. For example, powerful servers and workstations enable the design of aircraft, automobiles, appliances, and industrial equipment that use energy more efficiently and generate fewer GHG emissions than the versions they are replacing.

New technologies can also prompt important shifts in consumer behavior. Solutions providing real-time energy monitoring and reporting make consumption more transparent. By seeing the impact of their energy use—in terms of both its cost and its associated GHG emissions—consumers can make more informed choices when using household appliances and devices, heating and cooling their homes, and purchasing new products.

Our approach to improving energy efficiency takes a broad view across the entire product life cycle. HP Labs is collaborating with the University of California at Berkeley to develop the Lifetime Exergy Advisor.¹ Designers will employ this tool to assess a product’s total environmental impact (including energy use and GHG emissions). It can then help determine the environmental benefits gained from using alternative kinds and combinations of materials and processes across every phase of the product life cycle, including materials extraction, manufacturing, shipping, use and recycling.

Substitute

The second area of opportunity is in replacing carbon-intensive activities with low-carbon alternatives. For example, our HP Halo Telepresence Solutions reduces the need for business travel, a significant source of GHG emissions, by replicating the meeting environment virtually.

In addition, the web services and client devices we are developing to help power the Internet economy and replace physical processes are making commerce and information sharing increasingly more efficient. Shifting purchases online, for instance, lessens the need for complex logistics and store infrastructure to serve customers, and in doing so, conserves energy and limits GHG emissions.

We are also researching electronic displays to replace printed materials that are typically used just once, such as newspapers. This technology has the potential to reduce waste, which in turn would decrease energy use and associated GHG emissions from manufacturing and distributing paper.

Enable

Facilitating the world’s transition to a low-carbon economy is a third area of opportunity for HP. This shift will require technologies to support emerging carbon markets, and sophisticated monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions. We are investigating software and services to help assess, manage and report energy use and GHG emissions generated by our customers’ businesses, including their supply chains.

We are also helping automate workflows, enabling companies to adopt digital processes that can save significant amounts of energy and resources. For example, HP Web JetAdmin makes it easy to remotely configure, monitor and manage fleets of printers to save power. Other HP technologies help reduce paper waste. By streamlining the delivery of documents, HP Output Server can decrease an organization’s printed pages by up to 70 percent. Plus, businesses that use print on demand solutions like HP Retail Marketing Automation can reduce excess signage and printed marketing materials by up to 90 percent.

These opportunities are not limited to developed economies. In fact, a key to creating a low-carbon future is developing IT solutions that enable smarter growth in emerging and developing economies. As countries build their infrastructure from the ground up, we have an opportunity to help them bypass more energy-intensive approaches in favor of solutions such as web services and electronic commerce with a lower greenhouse gas impact. We are working to capitalize on these opportunities and intend for HP to be a leader in providing the technological solutions that give countries, businesses and individuals an advantage in a low-carbon world.

¹"Exergy" refers to the energy available within a system to do work.