(This is the first article in a five-part series.)

It’s no secret: Energy consumption is skyrocketing as IT equipment proliferates across enterprises large and small. In fact, U.S. data centers ate up 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006, at a cost of $4.5 billion, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s approximately twice as much power as they consumed in 2000—and the EPA expects data center energy consumption to double again by 2011.

Statistics like that have many IT professionals investigating “green IT” measures designed to cut power usage and shrink the carbon footprint of their IT operations. Yet only 15 percent of companies with at least 1,000 employees have an overall green IT implementation plan in place, according to an October 2007 survey from Cambridge, Mass.-based analyst firm Forrester Research Inc.

That’s not surprising. Going green can seem daunting, particularly where to begin. Fortunately, there’s significant overlap between going green and the simple common sense of running a tight IT ship. Buying energy-efficient new hardware is the first of five steps your company can take even if it doesn’t have a formal green IT initiative. Newer hardware almost always uses less energy, and there’s a good chance it will also come with energy-management tools that shut off the power automatically after lengthy idle periods.

Savvy IT pros are beginning to appreciate the logic of updating their hardware. “Every four to five years, innovation and improvement in the IT industry aim to deliver more efficient equipment,” observes Laxmi Rao, IT energy coordinator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, Mass. Consider laptops, she notes. “One year, the power supplies are more efficient, the next year, the LCD is better,” says Rao. “We make sure we get the equipment that delivers better [energy] performance.”

Here are further examples of how newer means greener when it comes to hardware: