BT Wholesale

INDUSTRY NEWS


2 May 2008

IT Emissions to Quadruple by 2020


Carbon emissions from datacentre operations will quadruple over the next 12 years, with the IT contributing more to climate change than the aviation industry by 2020, it has been claimed.

A year-long study of IT energy trends by management consultant McKinsey revealed that datacentres continue to use energy wastefully, despite the 'green' rhetoric being espoused by many IT organisations.

Conducted in cooperation the Uptime Institute, an independent research company, the study suggested that a complete overhaul of corporate IT strategy is required to reduce the industry's impact on the environment.

"While the design of the next generation of 'green' datacenters gets a lot of attention and is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, we're putting forward the case in this report that improving efficiency in existing sites will lower energy usage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster and more significantly with less cost," said Kenneth Brill, founder of the Uptime Institute.

The study indicated that organisations are becoming increasingly reliant on IT to drive business growth, something that is leading to increased deployments of servers in the datacentre, and corresponding air-conditioning units to cool them.

According to the Uptime Institute, datacentres consume 0.5 per cent of all the energy that is produced around the world, and are already one of the leading causes of carbon emissions in many countries.

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

MORE INDUSTRY NEWS