Duncan Scott, CIO at DTZ, a global real estate company is quoted in UK’s Computing web site to avoid kW based pricing in the short term.

“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.”

The author of this article supports this idea that the shock of what the bills actually are would be a change IT cannot adapt to So delay the inevitable.

A $200-per-barrel oil price would be a jolt for IT, said David Tebbutt, programme director at analyst Freeform Dynamics. “This may wake people up to the true cost of IT, and move the cost of electricity from facilities budgets to IT,” he said.
“The cost of IT infrastructure would go shooting up. But you are not going to solve the problem quickly. You can get staff to behave differently and economise on power, but you can’t transform IT infrastructure at a stroke. It can take years.”

This is a new take on what to do about high power costs. Don’t tell people, because if they saw the bill, they wouldn’t be able to adapt quickly. Sounds like internal politics to not put a group on the spot as to what they will do to save energy.

As crazy as this sounds, maybe people do want to hide the energy bill, and avoid the problem. Sounds logical for an IT group that is understaffed, budget limited, and has no idea on what to do to make a green data center and green IT services.