Hale observes that energy efficiency has to be part of the broader IT agenda too. The Co-op is using customer-facing screens at the till point "to get across brand messages about reusable energy and our own ethical policies. It's about using the technology available".

Dale Vile, managing director of analyst Freeform Dynamics, says: "It's only right that, in industries like retail and manufacturing where distributed IT assets don't make up the main bulk of the energy bill that IT organizations should look at assets like Epos systems, and client devices used in places like warehouses, from an energy perspective."

Vile says IT's role is as much about enabling greener business operations as it is operating more efficiently.

"There are three areas where the IT organization can get involved. The first is dealing with energy consumption centrally, in the data center. for instance, which is relatively easy to do as IT has control. The second is the distributed IT assets -- as with the Co-op Epos project -- but this is harder to do as it can rely as much on changing user behavior, like switching things off, as it does getting full IT control. And the third is proving that everything from more efficient fleet management and supply chain to home-working IT resources can help the business optimize operations more -efficiently," he says.

Hale adds that the green initiatives already deployed in the Co-op's IT infrastructure were spurring the organization on to make evaluating power consumption and energy efficiency a mandatory part of the IT procurement process. "This has been formalized as part of the selection process, as a checkpoint to look for the more power-conscious devices," he says.