Joe Polastre is co-founder and chief technology officer at Sentilla.  Joe is responsible for defining and implementing the company's global technology and product strategy. In April, when the first year of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) programme takes effect, UK companies will have more reasons than ever to reduce power consumption in their data centres. CRC is a proposed mandatory cap and trade scheme that applies to organisations in public and private sectors that have a half-hourly metered electricity consumption greater than 6,000 MWh annually. The goal is to cut carbon emissions by 1.2 million tonnes per year by 2020. If an organisation qualifies for CRC, all of its energy use will be covered by the scheme, including emissions from direct energy use as well as electricity purchased. While it doesn’t sound like it, this is good news for companies with data centres.

Even though the scheme encompasses much more than just the data centre, it’s the data centre that has the opportunity to be an organisation’s CRC saviour. At last year’s BroadGroup Power & Cooling Conference, financial industry giant JP Morgan Chase announced that only 2% of their real estate is taken up by IT operations, but 20% of their company-wide power bill comes from IT. Similar breakdowns were quoted by operations at IBM and SAP. While data centres make up a small part of a company’s real estate, they have an amazing contribution to the power bill.

One way to reduce carbon-intensive tasks is to move manual processes to automated IT services. However, going this route increases IT demand, resulting in more energy consumption and a larger carbon footprint (defeats the whole purpose if you’re an IT manager, right?). The CRC scheme will create tremendous conflicting pressure on IT to take on new applications that reduce carbon contribution elsewhere in the organisation. In other words, IT must do more with less by instituting a comprehensive system of best practices for day-to-day energy management.

The data centre can make your organisation more efficient in many ways, but how efficient is it on its own? With energy management technology and a progressive reduction strategy, companies can achieve 40 percent or more energy savings in the data centre. When you consider that data centres consume 10 to 100 times more energy per square foot than the average office building, and in some cases up to 40 percent of an organisation’s carbon footprint, you begin to understand how CRC could help make energy efficiency in the data centre a very financially interesting opportunity.

So, how do you get there? While much of the CRC scheme can be intimidating and confusing, you should already have a plan in place to reduce energy consumption. Look at the big picture: Putting a best practices plan in place is financially and operationally rewarding. We often think of CRC as the driver to implement these programs, but in reality, reducing energy, freeing up capacity and making operations more efficient is the smart thing to do. The CRC benefits are the icing on the cake.

Even while the impact of CRC is on everyone's mind, it’s the wrong place to start thinking about Green IT. What’s missing? Instituting standard company-wide practices for energy and carbon management. Here IT organisations get a win-win scenario—optimised assets and replacement of old, inefficient equipment, reduced energy consumption and carbon footprint, lower operating costs, increased capacity for new applications that the rest of the company is demanding, and of course, a lowered carbon impact.

While CRC is somewhat unpopular and government's first attempt at mandating carbon reduction, it’s inevitable that carbon legislation will become widespread worldwide. The key is to get ahead of carbon legislation through measurement, management and organisational policies, thus reducing carbon impact, highlighting inefficient areas, and allowing your organisation to plan for future growth.