Last month the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) announced a new mandatory energy assessment scheme, Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS). It requires businesses over a certain size to report their energy usage to the Environment Agency.
ESOS mandates that companies need to identify the source of 90% of the power usage within their organisation and then make recommendations that can be implemented to reduce that power consumption. There will be fines and a public register of non-compliant firms.
I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination to work out where a significant amount of energy usage comes from – buildings, transport, lighting, along with the massive fleet of PCs, laptops and IT hardware within most organisations.
The impact of PCs specifically, on the energy bill of large firms, is actually considerable and should not be underestimated. For example, a UK Government report, Greening Government: ICT Annual Report, released in late 2013, suggests that right now its own end user IT devices from just fifteen departments are using 145,402, 517 kWh of energy annually which costs the Government over £17m per year! Large PC fleets are responsible for a lot of energy consumption, much of it wasted!
Now, ask any IT systems professional and I’m sure they’ll know they could save energy by encouraging staff to turn off PCs at night or when not in use over lunch, but is that enough? What is interesting about the ESOS regulation is that it requires the information supplied to the DECC to be verifiable – not just a figure that’s been plucked out of mid-air or rough estimates. Herein lies the biggest challenge – to include PCs, and, to do so accurately, businesses need to take every different PC, laptop, MacBook, and monitor and find out what the power usage of each was, not just whilst on, but on standby, suspend mode etc. It’s simply not possible to do this manually.
As a leader in PC power management, we know that many businesses across the UK aren’t actively managing their PC fleet in the first place. There are tools that already exist to manage PC fleets such as Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager, but most aren’t going to be able to provide the accuracy and reporting that the ESOS regulation requires. SCCM doesn’t have the detailed power consumption profiles of individual makes of machines, meaning that they’re not going to be much use when it comes to reporting verifiable energy consumption to the Environment Agency. Dedicated, PC power management software will be essential if ESOS auditing is to be accurate.
How does this affect IT professionals?
ESOS is going to make the reporting of energy very visible within a company. The regulation requires that the energy audit to be submitted must be signed off by a director of the company so it will quickly show business heads which departments are doing well and those that aren’t. If not already in place, IT will need to procure the sort of power management software that will enable full and thorough reporting of energy by IT devices. Great news is power management software solutions typically pay for themselves within 6 months by the reduction in power usage and take care of ESOS reporting for IT.
There’s no need to panic just yet though – although the regulation came into law in July of this year, companies aren’t required to report energy usage until 5th December 2015. On top of this, there are a very specific set of criteria a company must fit into, in order to be affected by ESOS. The company must employ over 250 people in the UK, or if there are fewer than 250 employees then the company’s annual Turnover must be in excess of €50 million – in total that’s around 9,000 UK companies that fit the bill.
Moving away from the specifics of the regulation, what will be interesting to see is how companies will deal with this reporting. As was mentioned above, companies aren’t required to implement the recommendations they make to the Environment Agency, but surely it would be logical to do so from a cost-saving perspective.
ESOS is an opportunity for businesses to understand how to reduce their power consumption and that’s what the directive is really about. It’s not about just enforcing strict controls on businesses. It gives organisations the chance to understand where they’re wasting energy and give them the option to remedy that. In the US alone, somewhere in the region of $2.8bn in wasted energy comes from PCs, laptops and other corporate devices that are left switched on overnight.
Finally, it will be interesting to see who the responsibility for developing and filing these reports will fall to, the ESOS Assessment must be conducted or reviewed by a qualified Lead Assessor (the lead assessor may be an in-house expert or external consultant), any guesses who will get that job?
