According to Lord Redesdale, Chief Executive of the Energy Managers Association (EMA) in a recent interview with Utility Week it could and should be the IT department of your business.
Redesdale explained:
“Energy efficiency is the big one [focus]. We waste about 40 per cent of the energy we put into the system through doing things like lighting up the sides of buildings at night.
“[But] Most people are ignorant about the energy cost of computing.
“We’ve got to do more to regulate at point of use”
Redesdale believes that controlling the ‘carbon cost’ of IT should be the big focus in energy efficiency:
“IT professionals use more energy than pretty much anyone in most companies – yet they are not responsible for that fuel bill and they probably couldn’t even tell you what it was.”
To aid the resolution of this apparent ignorance, Redesdale has launched a unique training course IT Energy Management for which he has strong hopes:
“I’d be very surprised if any manager working in IT did not have this in five years’ time.
“I’d like to see three to four million people trained in the next five years”
Redesdale pointed to the growth in data storage as the single biggest cost and cause of energy usage for businesses and even likened the prevalence for cloud computing to a “digital landfill” with “remarkably similar emissions patterns”.
Redesdale referenced a case study involving Coca Cola Enterprises:
“They thought they knew everything there was to know about energy efficiency but within a short time they were saying ‘hey we could save 40 per cent of our energy bill’.”
The EMA’s new IT management qualification is designed to help IT professionals understand how reviewing what data needs to be stored and how, can make “enormous savings” in costs and energy. Something every business should be happy to follow.