Catherine Jones
The EDC is a capability of the UK Energy Research Centre and is based in the Science and Technology Facility Council/UK Research and Innovation. It is a small service with three staff members and a collection of research data, grey literature, and information on relevant energy funded projects. For the project described below they estimated the carbon impact as 932 kg CO2e per year.
The EDC supports researchers who are exploring energy and has a remit to hold research outputs for the long-term, but would also like to minimise the environmental impact of their service.
In 2021 they ran a project to investigate the impact of their policies on the energy consumption of the service - the public report is available here: An investigation into the impact of service policies on the energy consumption of the Energy Data Centre
In this project they used DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model and The National Archives DiAGRAM tool to set preservation service aspirations and identified collection risks. They then used an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) to measure energy use on physical servers and thus the impact of routine jobs run to implement policy decisions. As a result of this work they decided to adjust the frequency of some of the jobs and to review the resilience and redundancy of the service.
This was a short term project with a specific goal in mind. However it was both successful in identifying energy use and sharpening policy. It was very time-consuming to analyse the data and the IPMI tool only records energy consumption in steps which can lag actual consumption so it was difficult to accurately record usage. The use of the RAM and DiAGRAM tools enabled the EDC to focus on their goals and priorities. This exercise has made them more environmentally aware and is now a factor in planning and strategy decisions.