Potential green tech corporate role models for you to research

There are two new resources out for those of you who crave more case-study-type information to guide your corporate green initiatives. The first is a $399 guidebook from PR News that is an online resource containing case studies about companies (small and large) that have rearchitected some part of their business to be more green. Companies included in the guidebook are General Electric, Nickelodeon, Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart, the Broward County Library, National Geographic and about 100 others. (There's a complete list of what companies are featured on the order page, so you'll know what you're getting and can see whether anything maps well to your business.)

The other new list/ranking you should peek at is the 2008 Sustainable Business 20, which is researched and compiled by Progressive Investor newsletter. I'll highlight two types of companies on the list that should be of interest to readers of this blog.

First, there's some innovators that you should be aware of and that I'll do some future research on in order to write some standalone blogs. They are: First Solar, a leader in thin film solar (absolutely a hugely hot area because of the building retrofit implications); Solar Millennium, which is building the world's largest solar utility plants; Suzlon, a company that has about a 10.5 percent share of the wind generation market; and Climate Exchange, the carbon marketplace.

Second, you'll see some familiar names from the high-tech industry, who are listed for what they've been doing to improving the green profile of their product lines. The big three on that list are Google, recognized for its work on making its massive server farm operate at 90 percent efficient AND for its clean energy investments; IBM, for its work on cutting the energy draw for data center technologies by up to half by 2010; and Hewlett-Packard, which earns props for its data center work and for the lifecycle management technologies it has put into place to help control the environmental impact of its massive printing and imaging franchise.