A recent study by Accenture entitled "The Environmental Benefits of Moving to the Cloud" concludes that large organisations can reduce carbon emissions by 30% and smaller companies can achieve reductions of up to 90% by migrating to cloud services.

Not mentioned in the Chancellor's spending review (but revealed in Treasury documents) was an anouncement of changes to the way the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme will be aministered.

Originally businesses would receive a rebate based on the reduction in their carbon emmissions from a baseline, worst performers would pay in full.

In a recent survey by IFS 67% of 368 IT managers revealed they did not have the systems to monitor energy use, as required by the Energy Efficiency scheme.

Large electricity users had to register for the scheme by 30th September or face a £45,000 fine.

Source: Computer Weekly

Skandia has awarded Logica a three year, £12.5 million, contract to provide private cloud-based infrastructure.

The solution provides capacity on demand and also reduces Skandia’s carbon footprint.

The UK government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC EES) came into effect on the 1st of April 2010.

Unisys is helping the Nationwide Building Society to virtualise 500 servers as part of Nationwide’s Data Centre Transformation Programme. The programme will rollout over several years and will reduce operational and energy costs, with anticipated savings of £8m.

So far Nationwide has achieved a 12-1 reduction in the number of physical servers, deceasing their carbon footprint through a reduction in power and air-conditioning usage.

The average desktop/monitor combination consumes  up to 2000 kilowatt-hours (kWh)of electricity per year, of which 500 to 1000 kWh can be cut with simple power management.

According to a recent report the UK wastes £123m per year powering PCs out of hours. Each PC costs around £37 a year to run, but if you simply turn them off over night and at the weekend they cost just a £10 a year to run.

A desktop PC left on for 24 hours per day will create around 2,161lb of CO2 in a year.

According to a new report from IDC Britain was ranked in third place in the 'Green IT' index - the ICT Sustainability Index.

The report puts the UK  behind Japan and the US but in third place with Brazil, France and Germany.

The report evaluated the volume of greenhouse gases in the world then looked at the role of ICT in reducing those emissions.

In an effort to reduce carbon emmissions the UK government is introducing the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) in April 2010. This legislation applies to all UK companies consuming over 6,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year.

Whilst this legislation is a laudable effort to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions, it could have the unfortunate effect of disadvantaging the UK outsourcing industry and favouring offshore outsourcing operations.