Tech businesses may be heavy users of energy so they should be aware that from 1 April they may need to register for the Government's first major climate change initiative, the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC - more here). The CRC is a mandatory carbon emissions trading scheme and aims to give organisations financial and PR incentives to reduce their energy use. In turn this will help the Government meet the commitment it signed up to in the Climate Change Act 2008 to reduce the UK's greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050.
The scheme will work by the Government setting a scheme-wide cap on the amount of CO2 that the group of registered organisations can collectively emit in a year. Organisations will have to forecast how much CO2 they expect to emit from nearly all energy sources (not just electricity) in that year and purchase allowances from the Government to set off their expected emissions. At the end of the year, the organisations will have to calculate how much they have actually emitted and the Government will publish a league table showing each organisation's relative performance. Those at the bottom of the table will suffer monetary penalties and need to buy more allowances, not to mention that it could be a potential PR disaster.
Organisations will be required to fully take part in the first phase of the CRC if, in 2008, they had at least one half-hourly electricity meter and consumed at least 6,000 megawatt hours of electricity each year. Those organisations that have a half-hourly meter but do not meet the consumption threshold will still be required to disclose information about their electricity use to the Environment Agency.
Although calculating consumption may be tricky, it is important that organisations do not just ignore the registration requirements. Failure to do so will attract a fine of £5000, increasing by £500 daily until an organisation does register! The Government has estimated that around 5,000 organisations will need to register for full participation in the first phase of the CRC and it is highly likely that some IT intensive companies will be included in this first phase, at least for the reporting requirements if not the full trading scheme. This might mean looking at consolidation of servers, outsourcing, 'micro measurement', and optimising IT infrastructure.
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