"Energy is quickly becoming the number one concern in the data centre, " Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel, told the Sunday Tribune. "Leading practitioners are now measuring themselves on how much computing is done per watt."

He spoke to select reporters last week following the launch of the Intel-sponsored Innovation Value Institute at Maynooth. Rattner warned, however, that there was little more efficiency to be wrought from the company's products.

"We're at a fairly high degree of refinement in terms of processor efficiency. The real opportunity is elsewhere in the platform.

That means tracing the power flow all the way back to the mains."

At a recent Intel forum, the power issue was a hot topic - "no pun intended", quipped Rattner. But heat is indeed a problem. Power supplies to big sets of server computers often have to go through multiple conversions in their power supply - from AC to DC to AC.

"Even if you're 90% efficient, if you have to go through four of those, you go down to 60% efficiency, " said Rattner. The lost energy escapes as heat, requiring even more electricity to keep the data centre cool.

Last week the Sunday Tribune reported that shortages in power supply are hampering government plans for decentralisation, as large data centres would have to be located in a major urban centre in order to have adequate access to power supplies.

Last week, technology analysts Gartner Group warned that the UK faces chronic energy shortages because of increasing use of power. The average data centre uses more power in a year than the city of Leicester, the report found. There are 1,500 data centres in the UK.

"IT's age of innocence is nearing an end, " said Steve Prentice, head of research at Gartner. "Technology's clean and friendly 'weightless economy' image is being challenged by its growing environmental footprint."

Power-hungry data- centres could result in electricity shortages unless energy-reduction is made a core priority within IT departments, according to new research from BroadGroup.

Companies using huge amounts of computer power will also come under increasing pressure to cut energy consumption as a result of spiralling energy costs.

"The data-centre is environmentally unfriendly, " Keith Breed, a research director at BroadGroup, said. "The IT department has been divorced from reality as hardware costs have come down rapidly while computing power has risen dramatically. However, higher energy costs have not been factored in."

He said that the biggest consumers of IT power - financial services companies, internet gaming firms and internet service providers - may start to look at factoring rising energy costs into prices, a move that could mean the consumer ends up footing the ball.

Given that Ireland's electricity prices are substantially higher than those in the UK, moves in that direction may have an adverse effect on Ireland's overall IT industry as well as its burgeoning reputation as a global financial hub.

"It's a top priority, " agrees Rattner.