In January our finance director asked me for the energy and emissions figures for the technology estate. The company had committed to reporting them, a large customer had asked for them in a tender, and roughly a third of the questionnaire landed on my desk. I assumed it would take a week. It took four months and I still describe the result as an estimate.
The server room at head office has no sub meter. It sits inside the building's supply along with the lifts and the canteen. Every switch, screen and printer at our depots is inside a site electricity bill that facilities pays and I have never seen. Our cloud provider publishes a figure for our consumption that is honest about being a market based calculation rather than a measurement, which is a fair answer and not one you can put in an annual report without a footnote.
Then the surprise. Our largest single contribution is not running anything. It is buying things. The manufacture of roughly nine hundred laptops and seven hundred handheld terminals, replaced on a three year cycle, outweighs everything those devices consume in their working lives and everything in the server room besides.
That reframes the whole exercise. The lever is not efficiency, which is what I had assumed and what every supplier wanted to sell me. It is quantity and longevity. Moving the laptop cycle from three years to four does more than any technical measure available to me, and it is a conversation about warranty cost, residual value and how tolerant people are of a slower machine, none of which is a technical argument and all of which I now have to make.
We sub metered two rooms for two thousand four hundred pounds. We publish three numbers with their uncertainty stated plainly, because a confident wrong figure in an annual report is a liability. Purchasing now asks for consumption and repairability, and two suppliers could not answer either question.
For twenty years my estate has been measured in what it costs and what it delivers. This year it started being measured in what it consumes, and none of our systems were built to tell us.
– Serguey Shinder
