WASHINGTON: Businesses are not doing enough to become more energy efficient, according to Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist.

Rob Bernard wants to drive the efficiency gains he has made at the world’s biggest software firm — in everything from waste, transport emissions and greener buildings — through the company’s network of partners and the wider IT sector.

“A small percentage of the IT industry is doing really progressive, proactive things. But the problem is that over 80 per cent of IT professionals still aren’t really addressing this issue at the level they could. They don’t actively monitor and drive energy reduction. The problem is behaviour change not technology.”

Bernard says the perennial problem is that IT departments do not pay a company’s energy bills. “The first thing to do is have a governance model which has the IT department, the real estate facilities department and the financial officers all working together.”

While Microsoft has marked a change in corporate strategy which has seen it take on established players such as Google and Amazon in the domain of cloud computing, Bernard believes such providers could be more efficient.

“Anywhere access to your information is a key underpinning of where’s the industry’s heading. From my perspective, it’s really about making sure that you’re not being inefficient in the way that you’re doing that, and I would argue that many companies are very inefficient in that area today.”

Bernard says the IT industry needs to look at efficiency in data centres - the “clouds” of gigantic computing facilities that store digital data.

“Most data centres are operating at a power utilisation efficiency of 2.0, which means that for every two electrons that come into a building only one goes to computation - the other one goes to the air conditioning and the lights. We’ve already got our buildings down to 1.12. We’ve got to drive the whole industry way down on that 2.0,” Bernard says.

Last November Microsoft commissioned a study which found that deploying its cloud computing solutions in large organisations could reduce energy use and carbon emissions by more than 30 per cent, and more than 90 per cent in smaller operations.—Dawn/Guardian News Service