Google and Intel are leading an initiative backed by several big technology companies to reduce the amount of power wasted by personal computers.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative aims to make computers 50 per cent more power efficient by 2010. The companies say that achieving this goal would save an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that released by 11 million cars in a year.

The commitment, which is supported by Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, is part of a larger campaign to educate consumers about technology industry-related carbon dioxide emissions, which according to Gartner, the technology analysts, account for 2 per cent of the global total – a percentage on par with aviation.

"We aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions in an amount equal to shutting down 20 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants," Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said.

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Urs Holzle, senior vice president of operations at Google, said: "Today, the average desktop PC wastes nearly half of its power and the average server wastes one-third of its power."

The plan would save an estimated $5.5 billion in energy costs and would, its proponents say, increase the cost of a computer by only about $30 per unit. Reduced running costs would pay for the extra outlay within a couple of years, they say.

Industry experts were sceptical about the proposals, however, claiming that the reason companies could afford to set such targets was because of the "incredibly power inefficient" nature of computers, and pointing out that the slogan "always on computing" was still favoured by many vendors.

"Power efficiency has seldom played a role in the history of the computing industry," Martin Hingley, chief research officer at IDC, the research firm, said. "If anything we've been encouraged to use machines as much as we possibly can. Efficiency could begin to overtake performance as a design criteria, however, as rising fuel costs force IT managers to consider the cost of having computers on all the time."

Greenpeace said that computers are "extremely power intensive" and have been singled out by the European Commission as one of the first products to be subject to mandatory power efficiency measures when the Eco-design Directive comes into effect next month.

"We're also concerned that this initiative will be used to drive sales of more power efficient machines – contributing to global piles of e-waste – when there are many things people can do with existing machines to reduce power consumption, such as switching off monitors," a spokesman said.

Google and Intel say that their benchmarks follow guidelines set out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which encourage manufacturers to meet minimum energy efficiency standards in order to bear an approved logo.

This week DSG International, which owns Currys and PC World stores, called for similar labelling on electrical goods in the UK, as well as for makers of electrical goods to phase out stand-by switches.

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