Although the U.K.'s overall public-sector energy use is down from the baseline year of 1999, the increased usage of IT is driving up electricity use and associated emissions, according to a new government report.
The Environmental Audit Committee released its
Greening Government report [PDF] last week, showing that overall emissions have dropped by 6.3 percent from the baseline year of 1999. But the government is still far short of achieving its goal of a 12.5 percent cut by 2011.
One cause of the shortfall is a boost in electronics, notably in IT departments across the government. While the figure below from the report highlights the downward trend in total energy use and fossil fuel-based energy use, it shows how electricity use is climbing.
The report goes on to explain:
One of the key drivers of the rise in governmental energy usage may be the proliferation of computers, printers, laptops, chargers, lobby televisions, mobile phones and other Information and Communications Technology (ICT), as well as associated impacts {such as] air conditioning of server rooms as well as severe levels of waste and the disposal of old ICT (including toxic materials). Government must address the root causes of both the energy consumption rise and its increasing waste to encourage Industry to improve equipment life span, eco-design and energy consumption.
Among the ways the report suggests improvements can be made to reduce IT's impact on the country's climate goals are tried-and-true solutions as well as innovative ways to harness IT's power to bring down emissions outside the data center.
In the first category, the report urges the government to ramp up its green IT strategy, first launched in July 2008. One suggested improvement involves making all government data centers comply with the
European Data Centre Code of Conduct, launched at the end of 2008. Another suggests big efficiency improvements that are achievable by refreshing IT equipment on a four-year cycle (instead of on a shorter timeline), as well as including a full lifecycle impact as a key consideration of purchasing electronics. By factoring in the energy and environmental impacts of manufacturing and disposing of IT equipment, the overall energy required by the U.K.'s IT infrastructure can be reduced by potentially significant amounts.
The report also lists a number of ways that IT can be used to reduce the environmental impacts of transportation, including expanding the availability of telepresence and videoconferencing facilities, more sophisticated traffic monitoring and route-planning tools to reduce congestion, increased tools for ridesharing to boost vehicle occupancy rates, and improving overall transit network efficiency through projects like congestion charges, parking management, real-time traffic management like phased traffic-light systems.
