Thanks in part to its small population, Australia is the developed world's worst polluter per capita, accounting for 1.5% of the world's emissions. Its controversial new Clean Energy Act will force the country's 500 worst-polluting companies to pay a tax on their carbon emissions from 1 July 2012. The Australian government has set the initial price per tonne of carbon at A$23 ($23.80; £14.80), much higher than other similar schemes such as in the EU where the price is between $8.70 and $12.60 a tonne.
How will businesses prepare for this law?
In the UK, we learned a lot from the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme. The UK government didn’t endorse or impose a preferred method of carbon reporting (a factor that saw many organisations stall with their reporting, unsure which route to take) and it doesn’t look like the Australian government will either. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, when you have the likes of us around. 1E has helped its 1,400 customers, including Dell, CSC, the City of Melbourne and Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority save more than $550 million in energy costs alone, cutting CO2 emissions by 4.5 million tons.
Effectively, our customers all did the same thing. They started by looking at their office environment. PCs account for a large percentage of total organizational IT power consumption, and yet at least in 50% are not shut down at the end of the day or over the weekend. Yet there are clear savings to be made – a one night shut down of the world’s 1 billion PCs would save enough energy to power the Empire State Building for 30 years. NightWatchman® Enterprise has been licensed across 5.1 million PCs around the world, saving on average £25 per PC per year.
Simply put, our flagship PC power management solution NightWatchman Enterprise works. The built-in Enterprise View dashboard captures and highlights real energy and efficiency data across all locations, departments, hardware and operating systems.
As a result of deploying NightWatchman Enterprise™ from 1E on just 1,000 desktop PCs, City of Melbourne:

  • Saw cumulative savings of $175,000 AUD since deployment
  • Reduced energy consumption by 1,459,000 kWh
  • Prevented 1,648,670.00 kg of CO2 from entering the atmosphere

Again using NightWatchman Enterprise, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority was able to reduce power costs and associated CO2 emissions from computers by 51% since implementation. The project also made staff more energy conscious and encouraged them to ‘think green’. Read the full case study here.
For more information on NightWatchman Enterprise, please visit: https://www.1e.com/nightwatchman/