Australian Government ICT Sustainability Plan 2010 - 2015

26 May 2011

The 2008 Review of the Australian Government's use of Information and Communication Technology reported a significant disconnect between the Australian Government's overall sustainability agenda and its ability to understand and manage energy costs and the carbon footprint of its IT estate. The review also found that most agencies surveyed were unable to provide meaningful data in regard to energy use and costs.

3.1 Setting a whole-of government ICT energy consumption target

The objective of setting an energy consumption target for Australian Government ICT operations is to provide an incentive to manage, monitor and report ICT energy performance.

A target will drive Australian Government agencies to seek continual energy efficiency improvement through the use of appropriate technologies, infrastructure and practices. These benefits can be examined on a whole-of-government and/or whole-of-business approach, as ICT may provide enabling opportunities to drive energy efficiency in other areas of operation. The ICT energy consumption target will include energy consumed by ICT equipment and energy consumed to operate server room and data centre facilities.

There are three primary steps to setting a whole-of-government ICT energy consumption target. These are:

1. Establishing a baseline for ICT energy consumption

2. Forecasting the effect of agency energy efficiency

3. Forecasting the effect of external energy demand (e.g business growth)

The energy consumption target or Australian Government ICT operations will depend on the accuracy of information provided by agencies, alignment to sustainable initiatives, an agency's capacity to move to greater energy efficiency, and budgetary constraints on agencies.

While a whole-of-government ICT energy consumption target will be developed based on the above steps, subsequent progress and performance can be monitored using the existing online system for comprehensive activity reporting (OSCAR). Changes will be made to the OSCAR database to support ICT energy and carbon emission reporting in Australian Government operations.

Preliminary analysis indicates that the Australian Government ICT operations can expect to improve energy performance by up to 20 per cent on current consumption levels by 2015 due to improvements to desktop and data centre energy efficiencies. This equates to around 325,000 tonnes of carbon emissions mitigated over the term of the plan. A more accurate calculation will be determined through detailed analysis arising from the whole-of-government ICT energy consumption target process as outlined above.

3.2 ICT energy intensity measures and targets

Energy Intensity measures

Energy intensity measures have been identified for (1) desktop energy consumption including Pcs, Laptops, Thin Clients, Printers and other desktop peripherals, and (2) data centre and server room energy consumption.

Action: Agencies are required to adopt energy intensity measures to manage ICT energy consumption. These are:

(1) Desktop energy

Desktop energy efficiency improvements

The desktop energy per end user improvement will be driven by agencies implementing the Green ICT Quick Wins. Some examples of improving desktop energy efficiency are power management solutions, printer rationalisation and desktop virtualisation. A target of 90 per cent of all desktop computers is to be shutdown after hours by July 2010 (or within six months from announcement of this plan), which supports the 250 kWh per annum energy intensity target. 

Data Centre energy efficiency improvements

The initiatives to improve data centre and server room performance are outlined in the Australian Government Data Centre Strategy 2010 -2025. The strategy considers energy efficient technologies, consolidation strategies and improvements to data centre facilities infrastructure and design. Some of the technology improvements to gain energy efficiency benefits include the use of server virtualisation, cloud computing, storage de-duplication, thin provisioning, and disk spin-down. The data centre PUE target recognises that facilities infrastructure and accommodation space requires an extended lead time to allow for a re-fit to move to a more efficient premises.

Action: Agencies are required to adopt the initiatives listed in the Green ICT Quick Wins and the Australian Government Data Centre Strategy 2010-2025 to enable energy and carbon management improvements to desktop and data centre performance over the duration of the plan.