There has never been a project brief that included power consumption, said Tim Turquand, consultant at integrator Morse.

“I’ve never come across a customer where they are looking to buy IT hardware and said they were buying it on power,” he said.

“It would be a completely different way for projects to be scoped. You would need to be told, for example, that this project must not exceed ‘X’ amount of carbon emissions. That’s not even on the radar. And the industry is not able to provide that information anyway. Getting it in on time and to budget is the only driver.”

Chris Scott, who runs site and facilities services in northern Europe for IBM, said: “It is becoming more common now for us to meet facility managers (FMs) when talking about datacentre design.

“We are seeing CIOs and FMs in the same meetings. What constitutes a green datacentre has never been defined; they all use lots of power.

“Datacentre design until two or three years ago was about resiliency and contingency, and the more you put in the more energy IT burns. What is driving the demand now is changing.”

Robert Whiteley, research director at Forrester Research, said: “This has to be on every CIO’s radar. The datacentre is always the biggest consumer of power. A lot of new projects are being put on hold because their organisations can’t fit them into their ‘power budget’.”