At last the trade press is waking up to the fact that IT is an enormous consumer of power and that making CIOs responsible for the electricity bills is the right thing to do.

My colleague Duncan Scott CIO at DTZ Holdings was interviewed for an Article in Computing - IT departments threatened with rising energy bills forced to rethink strategies

“Datacentre providers have started to price by kilowatt and not by server footprint and performance, and those prices have gone up by 30 per cent in the past month,” said Duncan Scott, CIO at global commercial real estate management company DTZ Holdings.

“Inevitably we will have some kind of formula such as that used by the airlines that includes distress and passes the costs on.

“It is a bit of a stand-off at the moment. The question is what the price of oil is going to do next. Are the providers going to completely change their business model based on the oil price? My advice is avoid kilowatt pricing at the moment but accept that it is going to come eventually.”