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Nein to Nuclear – Germany’s volte-face could come with hefty cost and energy penalties if energy efficiencies are not made now

After the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the German chancellor Angela Merkel suspended the country’s nuclear energy policy and unplugged seven of Germany’s 17 reactors off the electricity grid. She also confirmed a decision to shut down all 17 nuclear reactors by 2022.
Let’s look a little deeper at this. 26% of Germany’s energy source comes from nuclear power. In other words, once all of the reactors are retired from the grid, the country faces looking elsewhere for one quarter of its energy source.
In a bid to ‘reassure’ the German population, the government has said that it would make sure that there will be no power shortages and ‘any shortfall in electricity supply will be covered by coal-fired power stations’– on the surface, this is comforting, but what does this really mean? What impact will it have on Germany’s aggressive CO2 emissions reductions target?
Alarmingly, according to Reuters Germany’s plan to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022 will add up to 40 million tones of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Deutsche Bank analysts estimate an extra 370 million tones of carbon dioxide emissions through 2020, compared with Societe Generale’s extra 406 million tones in the next eleven years. Surely, this would make the 40% emissions reduction by 2020 target more than just ambitious?
According to the the first independent, cross-industry network of leading companies in the energy industry in Germany, the Deutsche Unternehmensinitiative Energieeffizienz (DENEFF), there are €165 million and 1.1 terawatt hours (TWh) of potential savings per year to be realized through energy efficient or green technologies.
German businesses must act now to implement energy efficiency technologies and strategies to reduce their emissions contributions. The impetus is clear and there are simple steps that can be taken today. Why wait?
1E customers have had significant success with reducing their own emissions targets. CSC has reduced its PC energy consumption by 40% just by implementing advanced power management technology on its estate of computers. Leading structural engineering firm Arup saved 442 metric tonnes of CO2, again by taking the simple step of power managing its PCs. What’s more, as well as seeing impressive energy efficiencies, our customers see significant cost reductions. Watch this video to hear how Dell is saving $2.4m year on year. Beyond the PC, organisations can make significant savings in the data center too. CSC went on to engage with 1E and found that of 68 servers, 22% were wasting over 80% energy – and remember, for every watt of power saved in the data center, you save another in cooling, so there is potential to make double the savings.
To find out how your organization can make a valuable contribution to reducing CO2 emissions, give us a call!

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The FORRESTER WAVE™: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022

The FORRESTER WAVE™: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022