New JISC-funded SusteIT tool for ICT-related carbon, electricity and costs

24th April 2012

Updated Footprint Tool and Cost Figures

A new version of the JISC-funded SusteIT Footprinting Tool is now available with revised default figures for equipment energy and a power usage effectiveness (PUE) calculator. An accompanying report analyses the results of 27 UK colleges and universities who have used the previous version of our tool to estimate their ICT-related energy consumption and costs, and carbon emissions. Some of these cases are part of EAUC and London HE projects, and concludes that annual ICT electricity costs are around £90 million for higher education (HE) and around £57 million for further education (FE). These figures are respectively, around 30% and 20% higher than those produced in 2008. Factors in the increase are thought to be possible underestimation in 2008 (which had only a small sample size), increased IT intensity and more comprehensive assessment. The new results also find personal computing (PC, laptop etc.) energy to be a somewhat smaller proportion of total ICT energy than in 2008, with an average of 37% in high performance computing (HPC)-intensive universities, 33% in other universities and 45% in colleges. A major reason for this is likely to be the impact of powerdown measures.

The full results for each of the 27 institutions are available in the master Excel spreadsheet below.

ICT Footprinting tool

Download the updated version (March 2012) of this simple Excel tool to help estimate the energy consumption, costs and carbon emissions associated with an institution's ICT estate. This version has updated many of the original figures based on new sources of information, especially the IT energy consumption figures published by the Energy Star programme and feedback from a number of tool users. It also contains a new worksheet, on PUE in server rooms/data centres.

• Access it here