Cutting your IT energy costs — a practical guide

Energy is one of the largest hidden costs in IT. Whether you run your own servers, rent cloud infrastructure, or simply power a fleet of workstations, electricity bills add up — and they are only going one way.

Regulatory pressure is building too. The EU’s revised Energy Efficiency Directive requires businesses consuming more than 10 TJ annually (roughly £100k–£150k in electricity at current UK business rates) to complete energy audits by October 2026. While most SME thresholds sit above typical small business consumption, the direction of travel is clear: energy efficiency in IT is moving from optional to expected.

Here are practical steps you can take today.

Enable power management

A surprisingly large number of businesses leave workstations running 24/7. Configuring power management policies to put machines to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity costs nothing and can reduce desktop energy consumption by 40–60%.

For servers, enable processor power management (C-states, P-states) in BIOS and the operating system. Most modern workloads do not require CPUs to run at full turbo frequency continuously.

Extend hardware lifecycles responsibly

Replacing workstations and servers every three years is no longer necessary for most office workloads. Modern hardware (particularly SSD-based systems and machines with 8th-gen Intel or later processors) performs well beyond the traditional refresh cycle.

Extending refresh cycles from three to five years can reduce hardware capex by 20–30% and avoid the embedded carbon cost of manufacturing new devices. Balance this against security patching windows — ensure extended use does not leave you on unsupported operating systems.

Consolidate underutilised servers

If you run on-premise servers, check utilisation. A typical office server running at 5–10% CPU utilisation is wasting most of the energy it draws. Virtualisation or colocation can consolidate multiple underutilised hosts onto fewer physical machines, reducing power and cooling costs proportionally.

Choose efficient hardware

When you do buy, choose hardware with energy efficiency in mind:

• Workstations and laptops — look for ENERGY STAR certification and 80 PLUS power supplies. ARM-based devices (Apple Silicon, Snapdragon X) offer significantly better performance per watt than comparable x86 machines for most office tasks.
• Servers — 80 PLUS Platinum or Titanium rated power supplies reduce conversion losses by up to 6% compared to Gold-rated units.
• Cloud instances — ARM-based instances (AWS Graviton, Azure Cobalt) offer 10–20% lower cost per unit of compute for suitable workloads.

Right-size your cloud resources

Most businesses over-provision cloud instances, paying for capacity they rarely use. Rightsizing — matching instance types and sizes to actual workload demand — typically saves 20–40% on cloud spend.

Start with the easy wins: look for instances running at under 20% utilisation, identify orphaned storage volumes, and review whether Reserved Instances or committed-use discounts could replace on-demand pricing.

Align workloads with renewable energy

For businesses running significant batch or backup workloads (overnight processing, large data transfers, backup windows), scheduling these during periods of high renewable generation on the grid can reduce both cost and carbon. Some cloud providers offer carbon-aware instance scheduling that does this automatically.

How we can help

We can audit your current IT setup — on-premise, cloud, or hybrid — and identify where energy savings are available without impacting performance. From right-sizing cloud instances to recommending efficient hardware, we help you cut costs and reduce your environmental footprint.

Get in touch to discuss an energy efficiency review.