Analysis: IT power crisis - what can CIOs do?

As energy prices soar and businesses start thinking 'green', the IT department needs to cut down on electricity usage of computer hardware. Ron Condon offers some advice on how to do it.

Information technology should have been a force for good in the battle for the environment but it has turned out to be part of the problem.

While IT can - in theory - cut paper usage and the cost of travel through remote working and teleconferencing, the energy we use to power our PCs, networks and servers is going through the roof.

It may not seem a lot when you're sitting at your little desktop PC but remember there are around 38 million PCs in the UK. Richard Barrington, head of corporate affairs and public policy for Sun Microsystems, explains: "Most of them are 250w devices and they are not being turned off. In standby mode, they consume 75w, and even turned off they will still consume around 8w. Multiply that by 38 million and it's a big number."

And with all the heat generated by electronic equipment, offices need to run air-conditioning to cool things down again, so that consumes yet more power. Barrington says it has been estimated that worldwide IT and associated air-conditioning generates more than a billion tonnes of carbon per year.

So what can be done about it? Though the CIOs don't usually have responsibility for the electricity bill, they can set usage policies for computer equipment which cut down on energy consumption. In today's world of high energy prices and 'green' awareness, doing so should be a key element of IT governance at any organisation.

Mike Kelly, UK head of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for management consultants KPMG, has been working to reduce power usage at his company, and says it is easy to get some early gains. For instance, the advanced power management features in Windows, if switched on, will turn off the screen and stop the hard disk spinning after periods of inactivity. That alone may save around £50 per year per PC, he estimates.

Printers and photocopiers also eat up a lot of energy and tend to be left switched on in many offices. Kelly said: "We launched some awareness campaigns to remind people, for instance, that if they left the photocopier on overnight, it would use enough energy to print War and Peace."

He also set about overhauling an aging estate of around 2,000 printers. He managed to get rid of 1,200 printers at a stroke, replacing them with 240 more efficient multi-function devices. "Energy consumption was one of the factors we considered when choosing their replacement, and by going for multi-function devices we have cut direct running costs by £50,000 a year, and that does not include any saving we make in our air-conditioning," he says. The remaining 800 printers will be removed gradually.

He adds that, for extra savings, the machines are set to double-sided working by default. The company is also redesigning the templates of forms it uses to reduce the amount of ink and energy it takes to print them.

But the big savings are to be made by changing the behaviour of PC users, whose machines are only really in use for an average nine per cent of the time. Just switching off the screen of a PC will reduce power consumption by two-thirds - screen savers save the screen but do not save power. In addition PCs, printers and photocopiers should be switched off at night and at weekends, and if possible at lunchtimes.

Anyone concerned that all this switching on and off will damage equipment need not be concerned. According to the US-based Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: "The belief that frequent shutdowns [of PCs] are harmful persists from the days when hard disks did not automatically park their heads when shut off; and frequent on-off cycling could damage such hard disks. Conventional wisdom, however, has not kept pace with the rapid technological change in the computer industry. Modern hard disks are not significantly affected by frequent shutdowns."

The lab also makes the point that power-managed equipment may actually last longer because it will spend much of the time in a low-power sleep mode, and therefore reduce mechanical wear on disk drives and heat stress on other components.

Energy savings do not stop at the desktop, though - the data centre also offers huge opportunities for saving money and power. Sun's Barrington says: "It has been common practice to introduce a new server with every new application. This results in the average server running at just 20 per cent capacity."

The answer is to consolidate servers and to use virtualisation technology to allow different applications (and different operating systems if necessary) to share the same hardware. This approach can push server capacity usage up to more than 80 per cent. Fewer servers means less energy, less heat, less air-conditioning and even less floorspace, which should be good news to many organisations hoping to save on rent or use their space more effectively.

The trouble, says Barrington, is that although the arguments stack up, the cost of electricity is still small compared with other budget items - and CIOs often have higher priorities than power savings.

He says: "One CIO said to me: 'I have an annual IT budget of $1bn. Saving $25m a year on electricity comes pretty low down on my list of priorities'. Companies need to put targets against the CIO to achieve energy reduction. Electricity is the responsibility of the facilities department. The CIO doesn't pay for electricity, so it's not on his radar."

Even so, there seems to be an upswell of opinion in favour of doing something. This has been helped along by initiatives such as the ISO 14001 standard for environmental working, and moves by the public sector to adopt what it calls 'sustainable procurement'. This means that any company bidding for government work is expected to demonstrate a responsible approach to environmental concerns.

KPMG's Kelly says his company, the first to get ISO 14001 accreditation, has benefited directly from the certification in commercial terms. "It is definitely good for business. A couple of years ago, companies would ask if you had an environmental policy and you'd tick the box," he says. "Now they will ask you for more details - about how you manage the policy and monitor it. So in terms of bidding for business it can provide competitive advantage."

More than that, it can generate a common cause inside an organisation, he says, with employees suggesting ways to work better. "We know it can bring financial and environmental savings. But it also increases staff pride. They don't want to work for an organisation that is wasteful."