How Does IT Contribute to Greenhouse Emissions
This is very variable. Real life audits by Best Foot Forward have found IT emissions to vary from 5% to 25% of a business’s emissions. It needs to be carefully calculated and not just go along with “industry averages”..
The real difficulty in calculating the real price is the unknown contribution of the embodied carbon in IT equipment. The sheer number of components in a server for instance makes it impractical and extremely difficult to calculate embodied carbon once the device is on the market. Clearly device manufacturers carry the sole responsibility to accurately calculate and report on the relative embodied carbon in their various offerings.
At present the auditing industry does not have the data at hand it will continue to be difficult to say with absolute certainty that there is benefit to be had in replacing existing kit with the latest and more energy efficient model now or later, or perhaps never at all.