R&D at Hewlett Packard has sustainability in its genetic makeup

Is it possible for Hewlett Packard, the original tech company, to serve millions of new users, cut carbon and still manage to turn a healthy profit?
Hewlett Packard HQ Palo Alto
The Hewlett Packard HQ in Palo Alto. The company have set up net-zero datacentres at some of their US labs. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Sometimes you get what you ask for, even if it isn't quite what you wanted. While I was being shown around the offices of HP's late co-founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in Palo Alto this week, I was told about what happened when Hewlett created the specifications that would launch the company into a new period of growth.

Having started out making electronic components such as (wait for it) resistance-based audio oscillators, Hewlett (the technical genius behind the company) asked his team to create a calculator small enough to fit in his breast pocket. They obliged. The story goes that the team did the logical thing: they sewed a larger pocket onto Hewlett's shirt.

True or not, the story spotlights how many people tend to react when they are asked to meet what they see (at least initially) as impossible demands. But the company successfully cracked the computer-in-a-pocket challenge and I was fascinated to find it that is once again setting apparently impossible standards for engineers – and with a startling degree of success.

At a time when there is growing concern about the energy – and carbon-intensity of the datacentres used to keep the Cloud up and running, the company has been pushing towards net-zero energy datacentres. They have pilot projects in Palo Alto at HP Labs (which I visited) and at the HP Fort Collins Research Lab in Colorado (which I didn't). The idea is to create a growing number of facilities that consume net-zero energy from public utility grids. These are an early example of the rapid evolution of what I call zeronautics and potentially a significant contribution to Breakthrough Capitalism.

It's many years since I took a lingering look (from the street) at the famous garage where Hewlett and Packard started their company. In 1989, this was formally designated the birthplace of Silicon Valley. The 12x18ft shed, close to Stanford University (where Hewlett and Packard first met) is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Few people walking through the doors of the garage in 1938 could have guessed what was being incubated in that humble apology for a lab. In pretty much the same way, most people ushered into HP's Palo Alto datacenter would be hard-pressed to see the future at work there. But it is.

The noise in the facility is high enough that you are encouraged to wear earphones. Once inside, you find yourself among serried ranks of computer systems that are taller than humans. Some of the machines generated a great deal of heat, but others ran much cooler. A new generation of datacenter management solutions are being spawned here.

Key ingredients include a sophisticated sensor network, used to control the computing and cooling systems, the use of outside air for cooling and an integrated solar-powered micro-grid.

Hewlett and Packard had their factory designed in the early 1940s, as they scaled up operations beyond the capacity of the original garage. They had the new building oriented to allow natural lighting of the interiors – with that alignment just about perfect, many decades later, for the installation of solar photovoltaic units.

It was fascinating to watch the real-time monitoring data flowing in, with some solar arrays shadowed by oaks that are subject to a conservation order showing a significantly degraded performance because of shadowing.

HP itself has been under something of a shadow recently, not least because of its astonishing run of misfortune with CEOs: by 2011, the company had fired its third CEO in six years. But in talking to the interim head of HP Labs, Chandrakant Patel, I was struck by the way that the sustainability agenda is now increasingly part of the genetic make-up of the R&D effort, rather than a tack-on.

Now, instead of going after the 30% of the global population that is already reasonably well-provided with IT systems, Patel is exploring ways to help (and sell to) the 70% who are not. He talked a number of times of the triple bottom line, without having any inkling that I had coined the phrase 18 years ago.

As I added a coin to the collection on Bill's desk, a symbol of the founders' faith in human nature and determination to operate an open door policy, I recalled that instead of losing coins, people had gradually added to the stash. Still, on the hallowed ground of the Bill's and Dave's office suite, it was hard not to think heretical thoughts, and that the company's glory days could well be over.

A story Chandrakant Patel told me, however, suggested the possibility of an altogether happier trajectory into the future. He talked about a vegetable vendor he knows in India, who has no way of affording internet access, but could massively benefit from market information. The Cloud, Patel noted, is "heavy" on energy, so net-zero servers and data processing facilities could potentially hit three birds with one stone. New users could be served in their hundreds of millions, the carbon footprint of the relevant operations could be cut dramatically, and HP could turn a healthy profit in the process.

As a highly successful venture capitalist in nearby Menlo Park said, people often assume that sustainability inevitably means financial trade-off and penalties. Maybe in the old economic order. His view was unexpected: the reverse is likely to be true. Crack the social and environmental challenges and the chances are that your revenues and profits will rocket. I'm not sure how you "favourite" an operation like HP Labs in the sustainability space, but I'll be doing it once I work out how.

In the same way that people visiting the Bill-and-Dave garage in the early days would have been hard-pressed to spot the underlying trajectory of their efforts, so I suspect that most people who visit HP's Net-Zero energy datacentre today emerge with little sense of the potential contribution of this approach.

Hanging on a wall near Patel's office was a huge painting of Bill and Dave opening up the doors of the garage to reveal Planet Earth inside. An interesting reminder, if one was needed, of how much the industry they helped launch has grown up, scaled and embraced key elements of the sustainability agenda.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans and non-executive director at SustainAbility. His latest book is The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier (Earthscan/Taylor & Francis). He blogs at johnelkington.com and on Guardian Sustainable Business and tweets at @volansjohn
