The good news for any FD is that there are funding streams available to support companies that are looking to make ‘green’ savings.

The good news for any finance director is that there is funding available for ‘green’ savings using IT, according to Andy Dent MD of Innovit, which delivers managed service contracts to organisations in both the public and private sector. However, green IT is such a new genre of eco saving that protocols do not yet exist which make it easy for funders to tick boxes, stamp forms and hand over cash.

Whether it’s legislation or compliance in the form of the carbon reduction commitment (CRC) scheme which comes into force from April 2010, organisations are coming under increasing pressure from all sides to save energy and have an audit trail to demonstrate their green credentials.

Companies are well versed at looking at general areas such as heating and lighting as a way to reduce energy consumption and, as a rough rule of thumb, interest-free loans of up to £5,000 can easily be obtained if 20,000kWh of energy savings can be demonstrated.

Changing light bulbs is easy enough to implement and to measure savings as a result but arguably the biggest consumer of power within any business is the IT infrastructure, and that is regarded as a much more complex area to start unpicking in order to indentify power savings. The reality though is a lot less complex and very easy when you break IT down into three distinct areas.

Firstly, there’s the comms room where the servers are housed. This is itself a vortex of energy consumption because of the power needed for all the servers and the air conditioning to keep them cool.

But just because it’s the nerve centre of an organisation it doesn't mean significant efficiencies cannot be made. For example, we are currently working with a prestigious law firm to reduce their servers from 70 to six, and possibly even four, whilst at the same time improving the performance of their network.

This will be achieved through a combination of more efficient hardware and using technology such as cloud computing. As well as the energy savings there are other natural reductions such as annual refreshes. If, for example, it costs £15,000 each year for a refresh of 70 servers, the cost of refreshing six is a fraction of that.

And then of course there’s the knock-on effect of a massive reduction in the number of machines that need to be cooled and therefore a huge cost saving on air conditioning.

It’s not just servers where we can save money and energy, there’s all the interface machinery such as laptops and desktops as well. As with servers, energy saving has been the key driver for all manufacturers and the new Thin Client desktops use up to 20 times less power than conventional systems.

This can take usage down from around 100W to as little as five and 100 machines could pay for themselves over their lifetime because of the reduced energy they consume.

The third and final area is improved management of systems. For example, a centrally managed printing program can reduce toner consumption by 25% at a stroke with no visible change to print quality.

Also, a centrally managed program which puts machines into hibernation mode between specific hours will eliminate all those times when people forget to log off or turn off their PCs at the end of the day.

All of the technology mentioned in these three areas is readily available and costing models show that adopting the recommendations could pay for themselves in as little as eight months.

This all sounds simple, and it is. The problem is that the bodies that hold the purse strings are playing catch-up because they don’t have specific procedures in place to rubber stamp claims for IT projects.

The most important thing that we have found that any business with a plan to reduce energy consumption through IT efficiencies is having is a clearly demonstrable plan. With this in hand you’ll find you’ll be pushing on an open door but be prepared as they might also ask for a hand in devising the paperwork.