Power and responsibility go together

You’ve heard about business continuity. In 2006, you’ll be hearing about energy continuity. The man to watch is energy minister Malcolm Wicks. In the course of 2005, energy and climate change emerged as the key factors that “make the weather” in terms of news, politics and the behaviour of enterprises.

Everyone wants to save energy and check carbon emissions. At the Department of Trade and Industry, Wicks is the man charged with fixing all this.

Wicks wants schools, homes and businesses to engage in the “micro-generation ” of energy, producing it on site. He wants micro wind turbines, solar panels and other technologies in schools, homes and businesses, to lower carbon emissions.

Most domestic micro-generators will only offer less than 3kW of electricity, though business ones will typically run up to 100kW. Nevertheless, Wicks has welcomed the Potential for microgeneration, study and analysis report by the Energy Saving Trust. This body reckons that by 2050, micro-generation might provide 30 to 40 percent of the UK’s total electricity needs.

All this will be important to IT managers. They will have to work more closely with facilities managers, engineers and architects to put the sensors and software in place to monitor the new equipment. In fact the point about monitoring goes a lot further. Over the past year, many Greens have advocated the use of IT to gear the supply of energy more closely to demand – and so reduce the need to generate so much electricity.

We’ll hear a lot more about IT for energy management this year and for energy crisis management – when firms can’t rely on the National Grid. It’s worth knowing how we arrived at this point. As recently as February 2003, the White Paper Our energy future – creating a low carbon economy committed the UK to increasing renew- able sources of energy from three percent of current demand to 20 percent by 2020 and ruled out new nuclear power stations. Three years later, Malcolm Wicks, who is relatively new to his job, finds himself confronted with nuclear power being decommissioned, and coal the subject of strict EU rules on emissions.

About 30 percent of generating capacity will be lost by 2020, Britain will be a net importer of both oil and gas, and renewables will be going nowhere fast. Wicks’ springtime Energy Review will try to propose a way out of this. In the meantime, however, expect some searching questions on how your IT will work during a blackout. Expect, too, to see more servers like the Sun Fire T2000, which manufacturer Sun Microsystems claims will almost halve energy and cooling bills.