WEBSITE: The Green Grid

TEXT OF STORY

SCOTT JAGOW: Today in Denver some bitter rivals in the tech business are hanging out together: Microsoft, Sun, Dell, HP, IBM. They won't be smoking any peace pipes, but they will talk about how to make their industry more friendly to the environment. Lisa Napoli has more.

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LISA NAPOLI: The power needed to juice up computers, servers, A/C and other equipment at the world's technology companies has doubled over the past five years.

And of course it just keeps accelerating.

JOHN TUCCILLO: The demand for energy in terms of the data center is outpacing the ability for technology to be able to deliver it.

That's John Tuccillo of American Power Conversion. He says that's why fierce technology rivals came together to form something called the Green Grid earlier this year.

They figure that collectively these great engineering brains can figure out how to make computer data centers more efficient. Tuccillo says there are two reasons to do that.

TUCCILLO: There's an obvious environmental benefit, doing more for less, there's a cost benefit, again doing more for less.

The people gathering in Denver make up 90 percent of the world's computer systems makers. Their goal this week to is to come up with industry standards.

In Los Angeles, I'm Lisa Napoli for Marketplace.