The push to develop more environmentally friendly IT departments gained fresh momentum yesterday after Intel and Microsoft threw their weight behind the formal launch of the Green Grid, an industry-wide consortium dedicated to curbing datacentre power consumption.

The Green Grid was announced last year with the goal of developing and promoting best practice methodologies and standards for enhancing the energy efficiency of datacentres. Initiated by AMD, the new consortium was welcomed by customers increasingly concerned about the financial cost and environmental implications of power hungry server farms. However, experts subsequently claimed the group was making little actual progress and would struggle to develop standardised best practices without the backing of chip giant Intel.

Now the consortium has answered its critics with the unveiling of a technical charter, three new best practice whitepapers on energy efficient datacentres, and a new board of directors – including Intel and Microsoft as well as AMD, IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, VMWare, Rackable Systems, APC and Spraycool.

In a statement, the organisation said that the companies involved "represent leadership across all facets of product development for the datacentre and are collectively committed to driving new user-centric metrics, technology standards, and best practices for use by datacentre managers worldwide".

Rick Schuckle of Dell said that the priorities for the new group were to continue the development of metrics, standards and technical specifications for energy efficient datacentres, develop workshop sessions for vendors and users, and undertake education initiatives for both the IT industry and end users.

As a first step in this education programme, the group released three new whitepapers for IT chiefs, detailing the commercial importance of energy efficiency, best practices for reducing power consumption and the Green Grid's Power Usage Effectiveness and Datacentre Efficiency metrics for measuring energy use.

"The aim is to make the whole process as collaborative as possible," said John Tuccillo of APC. "We want user involvement in this."

John Davies of analyst firm AMR Research said the launch was "pretty exciting news" for IT chiefs and should result in the emergence of new technologies and resources for firms trying to limit the energy footprint of their datacentres.

"When you look at the datacentre of today there are a lot of quite simple things, like putting fans in the right place to deliver focused cooling for blades, that can be done to improve energy efficiency," he said. " Those things have been slow to happen because there was no agency coordinating all the different vendors designs, but the Green Grid should help tackle that problem."

He added that more tools and education on datacentre efficiency could also be expected through the new consortium. "[Energy efficiency] is becoming a matter of survival for vendors," he said. "In some geographies like California and Manhattan the grids are maxed out, so if they want to sell more kit they need to get IT chiefs to improve the energy efficiency of their datacentres."