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The Carbon Reporting and Energy Consumption scheme, due to enter its initial stages in April 2010, could punish IT users indiscriminately and out of proportion to their effect on the environment, warned a leading lawyer at the DatacenterDynamics conference in London this week.
With shared resources, such as colocation data centres, it is imperative to attribute costs fairly, warned Mark Chester, a property lawyer specialising in regeneration projects for legal firm Wragge & Co.
“The scheme could have big implications for data centre managers,” he said. “Operators could be picking up the tax and be unable to pass it on to the user” or unable to quantify the tax fairly among clients, based on their use.
Colocation contracts are akin to landlord-tenant agreements, where tenants are not necessarily bound to bear the costs.
APC’s VP for Global Industry and Government Alliances John Tuccillo agreed, saying that many data centre managers do not have the tools to measure each of their constituents’ energy consumption.
APC announced a new Data Center Efficiency calculator and said it would launch new tools to allocate energy costs and carbon impact to IT planners.
“Our work at the moment is all about creating a simple foundation for data centre management,” Tuccillo said. “If we can give data centre managers just 20-percent accuracy on measuring the units of energy used by each server or application, that’s pretty darn good and will give users a return on investment. But we can do a lot better than that.”
Related news: CRC could tax the conscientious, warns tax expert
Related research: Carbon/power regulation in California
Related conference: DatacenterDynamics London 2009
Keywords: Carbon Reduction Commitment, data center carbon emissions, Carbon Reporting and Energy Consumption | | 
