Fife Council’s IT service has slashed electricity consumption in recent years, helping the organisation to become more energy efficient and reduce its carbon footprint.
Like all councils, Fife is working towards challenging Scottish Government targets to reduce carbon emissions by 42% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.
Many of the council’s 18,000 employees depend on the IT network to do their job and the data centre in Glenrothes powers that network.
Although critical to delivering Fife’s public services, running a lot of servers and computer equipment also uses a lot of electricity.
In 2012 the data centre used almost 1.7million kWh but last year this came down to 842,000 kWh.
Sustainability champion, Councillor John Wincott, said: “We all have to do our bit to make Fife greener and reduce carbon emissions.
“This might mean changing habits or finding alternative ways of doing things.
“By reducing the number of machines in use and making the air-conditioning more energy efficient, our IT services have set a great example and halved the data centre’s energy consumption.”
Data centre manager Gordon Barron added: “Over time we’ve switched to fewer servers with more storage capacity so we can get the same job done using less power.
“But the real win was removing our old floor-to-ceiling air-conditioning units.
“A cooling system is essential in a data centre to stop the equipment from overheating but the new system sucks in cold air from outside and channels it to where it’s needed.
“You can target hotspots.”