HP is to sponsor the Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER) team, including providing technology to enhance the design, construction and operation of the solar racing vehicle as it prepares to race in the 2009 World Solar Challenge.

CUER’s first big test comes this month when Affinity will drive from Land’s End to John O’Groats in the UK using only the power of the sun’s energy. The car will also race from Victoria Falls to Cape Town in January 2009 as part of Zero Rally Africa – a carbon-neutral car rally crossing Zambia, Namibia and South Africa -- designed to demonstrate the viability and practicality of planet-friendly vehicles.

The company has provided the University with workstations and notebooks, which CUER is using to model design variations that will affect the car’s performance and analyse it against external factors such as weather and road conditions. Checks on the car – such as tyre pressures and battery levels – will be made at rest stops by connecting it to a tablet PC.

Like many IT companies, HP sponsors and promotes a wide range of fashionable eco-friendly initiatives. Although whether the impact of these schemes can ever hope to outweigh the impact on the environment of its products remains open to considerable doubt.

While environmentalist pressure groups continue to demand cutbacks in the world's aviation industry to reduce CO2 emissions, it is often forgotten that generating the power needed to run the world's IT infrastructure generates roughly the same amount of polar bear-threatening substances each year as every airline in the world, or the entire country of Sweden. X