Rising electricity costs and a spate of power cuts are forcing businesses to look at the energy consumption of their systems and data centres.

Electricity supply has always been a given, but concerns are now emerging as IT systems become increasingly power-hungry, and power cuts more common.

Worldwide production of electric power is running at about 18,000 terawatt-hours per year and is growing rapidly. In February, Computing reported that firms in dense urban areas such as London Docklands are facing serious power supply problems that could restrict their IT expansion plans.

Even universities are having problems. It is estimated that with rising prices, some London colleges will spend more than £5m on energy next year.

The first point of Computing’s Green Charter, which is central to our campaign to encourage IT departments to be more environmentally astute, is to encourage businesses to find out how much energy their IT systems use and monitor consumption levels.

According to environmental group the Carbon Trust, many departments do not know how much energy they use, and so find it difficult to identify energy-saving opportunities.

Steve Prentice, director of research at analyst Gartner, says it is important businesses know how much energy they use.

‘Organisations should take steps to understand the total power consumption of their IT environments as a preliminary move towards aggressive power reduction programmes, since cost savings may be substantial,’ he said.

Many businesses find it hard to monitor energy use. ‘With the geographic spread of our business and systems, it would be impossible to put a figure on what it costs to run all IT equipment. However, we all have a duty to make sure we use energy wisely,’ said Darryl West, director of group IT at Lloyds TSB.

But the Carbon Trust says knowing how much energy you are using is important.

‘Unless you know what you’re paying, you won’t know what impact the changes make. Keep track of your bills and how they change when you introduce energy-saving measures,’ said a spokesman.

Using a meter to monitor energy typically identifies savings of more than five per cent. Find out if your supplier keeps data for your business; larger sites should be able to access consumption readings taken at half-hourly intervals.

Installing a meter to regularly measure energy will provide firms with an accurate picture of power use. The more meter readings a business has, the better picture it can build and the faster energy-saving opportunities can be identified.

Installing sub-meters on power-hungry equipment also means you can see the usage patterns of that unit in detail.

Automatic meter reading systems provide accurate and timely data with the minimum of effort. Savings opportunities can be identified quickly and meters often pay for themselves within a year.

Rakesh Kumar, vice president at Gartner, says these measures can also be applied to servers.

‘The best thing for departments to do first is to look at the power ratings on their servers,’ he said. ‘They can do some reasonably easy and accurate calculations on how much power is being used.’

Richard Barrington, head of public policy at Sun Microsystems UK, says chief information officers (CIOs) will only measure how much energy they use when they absolutely need to.

‘Probably no more than five per cent of CIOs actually pay for their energy, so it just gets wrapped up into the facilities charge,’ says Barrington. ‘Until IT departments have a real problem, for example, they can’t get enough energy to the data centre to put in a new system, in most cases they don’t care. We say that every CIO should be accountable for his energy bill. This will be the first step towards solving the problem.’

In some cases it is difficult to measure whether energy is being used on IT or on general electrics. Organisations with data centres usually run on separate meters and, typically, about half the amount of energy use goes to desktops and the other half to data centres, although this will differ for service-oriented web businesses with more emphasis on the back-end.

Once businesses know how much energy is going where, they can begin to identify techniques to cut down on usage.

Catherine Doran, director of information management at Network Rail, says that when the organisation started monitoring usage, it quickly began to save energy and money.

‘We now continually monitor the environmental impact of all our activities and this year we have replaced 8,500 PC monitors with TFT screens, reducing energy consumption by two-thirds,’ she said.

Nick Monger-Godfrey, head of corporate responsibility at the John Lewis Partnership, has seen similar results.

‘Following a Partnership-wide energy awareness campaign, now all non-essential equipment is turned off every night in our head office sites and trading branches, and we have procedures in place for powering down registers after trade in our John Lewis branches,’ he said.

To sign up to the Green Computing Charter email us at: greencomputing@computing.co.uk

Full charter and more details: www.computing.co.uk/greencomputing