So let me amend that first statement. Saving energy is often a good idea; it’s just not always a popular one. You see vendors doing their utmost to promote green this, energy-saving that, but do such efforts actually translate into bottom line dollars? Not as often as you might think. I hear over and over from manufacturers, distributors, and resellers that while the green message looks great on paper, when it comes time to fill out a purchase order, money talks. If a customer thinks that the non-green part will cost less than the green one, it’s no big surprise which SKU is ordered.

Are there exceptions? Sure! And you’ll forgive my flippancy if I say, “Yeah, the exceptions mostly come from smart people.” I was raised by Depression-era grandparents, people who subscribed to the penny-wise, pound-foolish mindset. You buy a freezer to keep your food from rotting because it saves money in the long run. If you have to buy a new car today, do you buy a Hummer or something that gets better than 30 miles per gallon? (Clue: General Motors is currently looking to sell off its Hummer brand while simultaneously closing multiple truck and SUV plants.) Increasingly often, true savings accrue slowly and aren’t obvious until long after the purchase.

Not surprisingly, the hardest group to make see reason and have the proverbial fluorescent bulb click on over the head is consumers. Look at the graphics processor discussion in this month’s cover story. While hybrid graphics technologies are providing more visual bang for less energy buck, the bulk of attention still goes to the high-end GPUs from AMD/ATI and NVIDIA. And while mobile GPUs may emphasize power savings, there’s no getting around this absurd trend of triple- and quad-card configs that deliver less performance per watt consumed. Perhaps we can call it the GPU arms race. First one to wreck the planet wins.

Woops, there I go again getting all Al Gore on you. Maybe that’s another reason why green computing continues to struggle. After all, it’s a global problem. What’s another two or three GPUs against China and India building a dozen more coal plants? (Here’s a tasty tidbit, courtesy of the Associated Press: Potently toxic mercury is a by-product of some coal mining. One-fifth of the mercury in my home town’s Willamette River “came from China and other foreign sources.”) I don’t see it as a net effect problem. I see it as a lifelong mindset issue. A Prius will get you there just as fast as a Hummer. Two GPUs can deliver the same entertainment as four. However, in the long run, one mindset is more likely than the other to harm the world and drive you into consumer debt. Don’t I sound like your mother?

Let’s get to the point. It’s now clear that rattling off wattage numbers and single-digit dollars-per-month energy savings will not woo consumers. What does work with these people? Noise. Hardcore gamers don’t care about noise, of course. They’re too distracted with engines and explosions. But for everybody else, less is more. Green chips enable less noise because lower-power systems require less cooling. They also facilitate less size because less space for heat dissipation is needed for cooler components.

Personally, I had a full tower as my main office system, complete with a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4, two big heatsink-fans on the board, a 550W power supply, two graphics cards for quad-monitor output, and three case fans. That’s eight fans and a lot of stress-inducing background noise. When I could, I changed to a Shuttle XPC with a passively cooled NVIDIA Quadro NVS 440 (quad-ouput) card. That’s one fan on the CPU, one on the case, another on the much lower-power PSU—three total. Even setting aside the difference in how much less I now need to run my office’s air conditioner, the difference in noise between the two machines is incredible. Moreover, the Shuttle box now features four times as many CPU cores, and the whole thing takes up about one-quarter of the tower’s cubic space. How much money am I saving each month? I have no idea. For better or worse, I’m like most other consumers at heart, and pocket change isn’t weighty enough to sway my thinking. But I like quiet, and I like space.

Now, this isn’t to say that lots of people smarter than me don’t watch their long-term dollars and gravitate to similarly smart resellers. Todd Hebert, owner/manager of PC Synergy LLC, has sold 10 D5400XS-based systems within the past two months. You’d think that dual-processor Skulltrail buyers would be the least energy-conscious clients of all, but it turns out that Hebert has another four units preparing to ship to a client’s CAD department. The supposed ultra-gamer platform turned out to be an underground hit with some savvy commercial buyers.

While looking to evaluate some of the latest low-voltage Intel quad-core CPUs, Hebert recently remarked: “We have had a large client inquire about the low voltage (low wattage too) quad-core CPUs because of heat issues—not to mention power. Their power bill is $13,000 per month and rising. Packing two 120 watt CPUs, two 200 watt video cards, and a five-drive RAID array puts us at 1000 watts easily. We’ve been using 1200 watt PSUs to make sure there are no sags and to ensure some overhead. This also generates a ton of heat and thus requires significant cooling.”

Perhaps we’re still too close to the “green” concept for some people’s comfort, so how about enabling remote offices? By now, you’ve seen new stories with headlines like this June 17th piece from CNBC: “Telecommuting Picking Up As Gasoline Prices Soar.” Telecommuting is a play on both energy savings and increased worker productivity. The CNBC story notes that “recent studies show the U.S. could save 1.35 billion gallons of gas a year if workers able to telecommute did so an average of 1.6 times per week.” Control freak managers have yet to embrace the trend, but those who judge workers according to output rather than clock punches are seeing the benefits. In fact, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a measure mandating federal agency heads to find more ways to enable and leverage telecommuting.

Unlike the post-dot-com recession, today’s interest from telecommuting stems from a growing acceptance that we’re never going back to $2 per gallon for gas. Employers are increasingly faced with providing raises or gasoline allowances for commuting. Telecommuting cuts those needs, plus companies that schedule employees appropriately can maintain fewer desks and thus pay for less business space.

How can you profit from the telecommuting trend? Let your imagination wander a bit. My first impulse was to look up the one-year stock chart for the post-dot-com telecommuting fave, Polycom (PLCM), currently up about 35% from its April low. Polycom is one of the top players in the voice and video conferencing space. Pack a lunch and check out the company’s extensive line of telecommuting-friendly systems. If you need an alternative, you can’t go wrong with Cisco, no doubt the largest, most integrated name in the communications field.

Depending on the client, telecommuters may need more secure data connections between home and the main office. Virtual private networks (VPNs) address this, but the company serving up those VPN connections is going to not only need a firewall but also some security hardware with enough horsepower to handle a growing force of telecommuters. You can enter here with names like SonicWALL and WatchGuard.

On the home side, no one wants a spotty, jerky conferencing connection, so you can make sure the place is dialed in with Gigabit Ethernet and/or 802.11n. You want the Draft N gear not only for the throughput but the reception quality. The time to fight a dead spot or interference from the neighbor’s microwave oven is not when you’re on a sales call.

I was staying in a mountain cabin recently and, after realizing that AT&T had no cellular towers in my area, got to reacquaint myself with Skype. I was stunned at the audio and visual quality possible on just a solid 802.11g connection, and I became an instant believer in the ability of even microbusiness employees to conduct reliable, high-quality conferencing over the Internet for literally pennies, if not for free. The guy I stayed with was using it to evaluate and negotiate restaurant property space on the Red Sea. All he had to do was invest in a current-gen notebook with decent wireless and a built-in camera. (He’s not the type to add clutter with a USB Web cam. Personally, I dig my Logitech Orbit.) While living with his family on the Red Sea next year, he’ll use the same technology to monitor his properties here at home while his wife telecommutes to her California-based employer from thousands of miles away. If that’s not a great example of “being there” from afar, I don’t know what is. Performing the same tasks by periodically buying plane fares and burning all that jet fuel would make their Red Sea opportunities impossible.

The other way to save energy by virtually being there is, of course, remote management. If I sound like a broken record, forgive me, but the message is too important to let slip idly by. Intel has its vPro platform, and AMD will be making its own stab into remote management with vPro’s little brother, DASH, sometime in the next year. Both platforms give admins large and small the ability to use a single console PC, even a notebook by some poolside, to control potentially fleets of compatible, manageable desktop and notebook systems.

Forget the services revenue for resellers that perform the outsourced administration. Just think about the fuel costs and service tech time saved by not having to roll a truck every time some worker has a PC problem. The admin, whether internal or outsourced, simply uses the console software to investigate and remediate the system from wherever he is, no matter what the hour. It’s a terrific energy savings play that doesn’t discuss energy at all—only money saved.

That’s the thing about energy savings. We have this preconception that it costs big bucks, maybe because we’re so used to seeing those higher price tags on the hybrid vehicles. But there are so many ways that going green can save money, ways that have nothing to do with monthly power bills. Find those ways, and I think you’ll have found several paths to bigger, better sales.