Does anyone have a good estimate of how much electricity businesses use on IT?

I've been studying this for a while, but however hard I've looked, I've not found a reliable estimate of how much of their electricity businesses use on IT. I inlcude desktop PCs, networking equipment, servers, storage, data center cooling etc. Any good ideas? (Jonathan Koomey, a US research has answered the data center bit, but that's only half the story).

This is a really difficult question to answer without knowing the nature of the business.

But I can tell you that reduction of power usage is often a major discussion point in IT depts in major companies. The investment bank I worked for was planning a lot of its future hardware purchasing more around power than processing speed, and even switched vendors (a big deal for big companies) to get better power deals. It's the next major hurdle in corporate information technology.

This is a difficult question to answer because typically the IT costs will only be partially centralised. Most electricity businesses will have a sizeable IT budget, but this will usually not include all of the IT costs as defined by you - specifically it may not include data center cooling, which is likely to be in the facilities budget, and it almost certainly won't cover those IT systems which are dedicated to engineering (as opposed to administrative) use, such as network control and power station control and instrumentation. Not all businesses include personal IT equipment in their IT budget either, although nowadays most do because of the bulk purchasing advantages.

If you want to do an estimate, I suggest you find an electricity company where you can actually find the budget of the central IT department, and then find out (by talking to them) what systems aren't included, and try and estimate the cost of these - for example estimate one power station then multiply by the number of power stations, etc.

Alternatively, you could probably make an estimate simply by talking to one of the big IT companies - they probably have a pretty fair idea of how much they're getting and what it represents as a market share. Whether they'll tell you is another question of course - you'll have to explain why you want to know.

I run ~ $AUS350-450 / year for each machine (PC size), which includes printer usage and air conditioning for machine and lighting for station.

Multiply this by number of machines in the size of business.

or calculate your wattage used per device for each item, and multiply by hours on / week/year and multiply by local electricity charge / kwhr