The federal government is looking to support its climate commitments with carbon accounting software to be a “single source of truth” about the emissions of the Australian Public Service.
An RFI published last week kicked off the process, with Finance seeking market information on “potential solutions to collect, store, account, manage and report data related to greenhouse gas emissions”.
This would include “tracking and usage of carbon offsets, electricity and gas usage, domestic business flights and fleet vehicle usage”.
According to the tender documents, the platform would capture both greenhouse gas emissions and raw energy usage data.
At this stage, the department is conducting a market sounding rather than an active procurement.
Carbon accounting is a key part of achieving the Net Zero in Government Operations Strategy, announced in June 2022, and for which a roadmap was just released at the UN’s COP28 climate talks.
Finance is asking RFI respondents to discuss whether they’re offering a cloud, hybrid, or on-prem deployment model, and noted that the department already has a managed Azure instance it would be keen to host the carbon accounting system on.
While not a requirement, the department is also keen to hear about the AI or machine learning capabilities vendors would bring to “the collection, analysis and reporting of the data including data modelling and forecasting [or] projections”.
The system would need a secure portal accessible to all Commonwealth government organisations, be able to ingest “bulk data in a variety of formats”, and offer the capability to audit all changes to data.
As part of its net zero strategy, the government announced last week that all data centre providers, rather than only those supplying under panel contracts, would be required to meet NABERS standards by 2025.
