There are big bucks to be made in the green data center space in the coming years, according to a forecast from Pike Research. Over the next half decade, energy efficient IT and supporting systems — particularly power and cooling — will grow yearly, green data center revenues from $7.5 billion today to $41.4 billion by 2015 globally, capturing 28 percent of the data center market.

As mentioned earlier, power and cooling infrastructure will capture the lion’s share of the windfall at 46 percent. That will be followed by energy efficient server, storage and connecting IT infrastructure at 41 percent and energy management and monitoring at 14 percent.

Why the surge? According to Pike analyst, Eric Woods, C-suite attitudes toward energy costs are changing.  “Cost of energy has seldom been a concern for IT departments in the past and there was little incentive to invest in energy efficiency improvements.  But as data center energy costs become more visible, the financial benefits of moving to a greener mode of operation are being recognized by CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs.” That visibility is only certain to rise as more and more data center-intensive cloud projects take off.

You can catch a preview of Pike Research’s “Green Data Centers” report with this executive summary.

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