Deconstructing Carbon Footprint for IT – Measure Up!

December 18, 2007 | Filed Under GreenIT, carbon, emissions, enterprise, footprint, power consumption, trust | 1 Comment

A recent report from the Carbon Trust says only 1% of Enterprises in England know their carbon footprint. That brought to mind a presentation at the London Carbonfootprint-IT Summit which made the point that even if an organization knows its overall carbon footprint, reducing it requires detailed knowledge of operations … knowledge that virtually no Enterprise has about IT.

One of our current projects is in the U.S 1% club. Good. But what do you do with a pie chart showing two sources, buildings and transportation, at 50% each? How do you know how the size of IT’s slice on the chart?

Power consumption by Enterprise IT is a bigger number than most believe. But, the only way to know the number is to count it up, piece by piece. It’s a cliché, but true … you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t get credit for saving money and reducing carbon emissions unless you can show where you started.