Approximately nine million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity costing more than a million pounds are used annually by ICT equipment at a single typical UK higher education institution, a total of 19 per cent of its non-domestic energy use, Headstar’s conference ‘Techno-footprint: ICT and sustainability in the public sector’ heard last month (http://www.headstar-events.com/techno08/).
The study, undertaken at Sheffield University, was carried out by the Sustainable IT in Tertiary Education initiative (SusteIT – http://www.susteit.org.uk/), which is managed by the University of Bradford with SustainIT, an independent charity.
The project has developed its own spreadsheet-based tool to measure energy and carbon footprints of higher education institutions by tracking the number and type of devices in an ICT department.
Peter James, Director of SusteIT, said the full findings of the research, due to be published in January, would serve two purposes: “Firstly, it provides persuasive headline figures – a lot of people were shocked by the figures of Sheffield, and this helps create support for change. Secondly, the figures show where the issues are and what areas we need to focus on.”
Liam Newcombe, of Data Centre Specialist Group at the British Computer Society (BCS), said data centres were finding it tough to generate efficiencies due to a combination of factors including rising power consumption of their devices; rising demand for IT services; rising energy costs; and energy availability problems.
Newcombe said the BCS had developed its own data centre energy use and cost simulation tool with the Carbon Trust, which would provide a useful framework for measuring the effectiveness over time of various possible solutions to energy problems. Early indications showed that virtualisation and high performance computing grids were far more energy- and cost-effective than single application servers, he said.
