Results from Use of the JISC/SusteIT Footprinting Tool, April 2012

This paper summarises the findings from use of the JISC-funded SusteIT ICT Footprinting Tool to estimate the ICT-related energy consumption and costs, and carbon emissions, of 27 UK colleges and universities. (The full results are in an accompanying Master Results spreadsheet). Scaling the results of 25 of these institutions to UK national level suggests that total ICT energy costs (which are mainly electricity) are around £90 million a year for higher education and around £57 million a year for further education. These figures are, respectively, around 30% and 20% higher than those produced in 2008 from a much smaller sample. As the sample size is larger, these new figures are more robust. The increase is also likely to be in part a result of increased IT intensity and more comprehensive assessmentsince the original institutions were audited. 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 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