Deconstructing Carbon Footprint for IT – Measure Up!
December 18, 2007 | Filed Under GreenIT, carbon, emissions, enterprise, footprint, power consumption, trust |
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.
Well, pragmatically it’s got to be a combination of measurement (e.g. for data centres) and modelling (for phone chargers and PCs) - measuring the lot isn’t feasible.
On the former, we are starting to submeter even broom cupboard computer rooms (Zigbee is great).
For the latter, we use asset management software to track our PCs by model and know how much each draws. Therefore we can model the energy use of our PC estate.
The knack is drawing these two sets of data together into a carbon dashboard…
However that can be peanuts when compared to whole-lifecycle analysis. About 80% of a PC’s carbon footprint is outside of the operational phase. So, we need to factor that in too.
Comment by Simon Redding — February 22, 2008 #