Westminster computing put on size-zero diet
Whitehall's green IT champion doesn't like pies with his chips
Published: 13 November 2009 15:22 GMT by Nick Heath
Show related articlesWith the government hoping to offset or reduce all the CO2 emissions produced by its fleet of half a million computers by 2012, IT is under more pressure than ever to go green.
As a result, the public sector has "stopped eating pies and put ourselves on a diet" when it comes to carbon, according to the government's green IT champion, Chris Chant.
To help with the diet, 110 green ICT action plans have been submitted from within central and local government as well as the wider public sector since the government published its Greening Government IT strategy in July 2008.
Measures being implemented under the green ICT action plans include server virtualisation, the use of thin client computers, using power management software to shut down unused machines, efficient printing practices, remote working and using video and teleconferencing instead of travelling to meetings.
Chant, who is also the CIO for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), believes the government has now laid the groundwork to trim the 460,000 tonnes of CO2 pumped out by Whitehall IT each year.
"We are ahead [of the private sector] in government and ahead of most other countries out there as well," he said.
The move to make Whitehall IT more environmentally friendly has been backed by the public sector's IT chiefs, according to Chant.
"The greatest success has been participation of the CIOs, CTOs and all those people in the ICT profession within government - it has been amazing," he told the Green IT Expo in London this week.
Green initiatives already underway include the DCMS' adoption of power-management software NightWatchman, which switches off PCs when they are not in use.
Thanks to the energy savings the software has made, the department achieved ROI on the cost of using the system in about six months.
Other departments have also realised significant savings with the software. After swapping to NightWatchman in 2006, the Department for Children, Schools and Families cut its CO2 emissions by 35,290kg in two years.
Other government energy-saving initiatives include the Department for Energy and Climate Change's (Decc) recent move to replace all of its desktop PCs with laptops to cut power consumption.
Trevor Hutchings, head of the low carbon economy for the Decc, told the Green IT Expo: "Government is taking advantage of significant CO2 and cost savings through green IT and making a dent into the £14bn that the public sector spends on ICT every year."
However, the public sector's progress on cutting CO2 has been slow to date. In September the government announced that during the previous year it had lowered its IT-related carbon footprint by 12,000 tonnes - a cut of just 2.6 per cent of its total computing-related emissions.
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