Managing carbon reduction across your data centre assets

Posted: February 12, 2010 in White Papers
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ABSTRACT

Over one third of UK CO₂ emissions come from the business and public sectors, with the rest made up from areas such as domestic and travel. In 2005, the European Union (EU) introduced the concept of an Emission Trading System (EU ETS), creating the largest greenhouse gas emission trading system worldwide1.

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Introduction

Over one third of UK CO₂ emissions come from the business and public sectors, with the rest made up from areas such as domestic and travel. In 2005, the European Union (EU) introduced the concept of an Emission Trading System (EU ETS), creating the largest greenhouse gas emission trading system worldwide1. The EU ETS was built on an EU Directive (2003/87/EC), enacted in October 2003. The EU ETS mandated EU countries to set up their own electronic registries in which to keep records of greenhouse gas emissions for their countries. Over the whole of this sits an EU Central Administrator, who maintains the Central Independent Transaction Log, checking for any irregularities in transactions. The EU ETS is also allied with the various Climate Change Agreements (CCAs) aimed at reducing greenhouse gases2. Whereas the EU ETS and the CCAs are aimed at energy intensive organisations such as metal smelting, oil refining and other sectors where energy is a major aspect of their core operations, it has left a gap for less energy intensive organisations (those where energy usage is subsidiary to their core operations) who nevertheless have high energy usage patterns overall.
Within the UK, this has led to the creation of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), now known as the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC EES). Throughout this report, Quocirca will refer to this as the CRC. The aim of the CRC is to reduce the levels of carbon emissions from what are termed as “low energy intensive” organisations by approximately 1.2 million tonnes of CO₂ per annum by 2050.
The CRC will become law in the UK in April 2010, and will be compulsory for organisations that have a half-hourly metered electricity usage of 6,000 MWh as measured between January 1st and December 31st 2008 - or in 2009 prices, an electricity bill of around £500k. All organisations that fall in to this group should have been notified by the Environment Agency by July 2009. As such, it is impossible for these organisations to do anything now to try and come in under the 6,000 MWh/yr lower limit - but those not yet caught in the net should plan now to try and avoid the widening of the net in the future, and those who have been notified should do everything they can to minimise its impact, or maximise the benefits that can be gained. In its current form, the CRC will impact around the 5,000 largest electricity users in the UK.
This paper looks at what can be done to effectively manage the IT component of an organisation’s energy usage, and how organisations not yet in the net of the CRC can take steps now to minimise the impact of CRC - or avoid it for a longer period.