Economic Aspects of Green ICT

Environmental concerns increasingly become a priority and a global issue. In spite of that, the major incentive for a company to go green is reducing costs and increase revenues. While green ICT practices mostly focus on environmental and technical issues, they barely address the implicit economic impact that they may have. This aspect is critical in the decision-making process for many researchers and practitioners that need to estimate upfront the financial impact of applying a practice. As a consequence, we believe users can minimize these issues by using the following two approaches: (i) a green model to visualize the business value exchanged between enterprises and end-users when applying a green strategy; and (ii) a system to calculate the cost savings that would be obtained when applying a green practice on a pre-existing ICT solution. In this chapter, we propose using the e3value technique to model and perform trade-off analysis among alternative green practices, particularly from an economic perspective. Moreover, we have designed and implemented a Web-based software tool that enables to analyze and calculate the direct and indirect economic impact of a practice before it is adopted in production. These two approaches are the first step towards calculating how much green ICT costs, and motivating organizations to reuse green ICT solutions based on informed decisions.