"If you reach a certain power level you can shut particular machines down gracefully, and when you get to another level you can shut others down, so your critical server stays online," Jones said.

HP is pitching thermal assessment services as a channel value-add, which it believes should explode as environmental issues get more important. "Customers are prepared to pay for outsourcing their issues with heat and datacentres, and it's something resellers are just starting to get into in their own right as well," he said.

"Every single box they sell has an opportunity for UPS and that opportunity is much bigger than just electricity." It's the big picture that counts, though. "It's important to think very clearly about how you put datacentres together. What technology are you putting in and where are the weakest links?" Jones said.

The Department of Climate Change said extreme temperatures, particularly in summer, not only increase peak demand, but also affect the production and transmission of energy.

"Higher temperatures are likely to affect the transmission efficiency of power lines. Higher water temperatures, combined with reduced water availability, will result in decreased cooling capacity for thermoelectric generation," the department wrote in a recent report, Climate Change Impacts on Australia's Human Settlements and Infrastructure.

According to the department, bush fires, dust storms and floods will multiply. Heat waves can also disrupt transport systems as well as increase building maintenance. The cost of cooling buildings or retrofitting them to boost energy efficiency will rise, dragging insurance premiums along for the ride, upping the ante for businesses.

Perfect storm American Power Conversion (APC) country manager, Gordon Makryllos, agreed climate change was forcing customers to seek more network protection. Yet more businesses and consumers are adopting air conditioning as a solution to higher temperatures - complicating things further by putting massive pressure on the power supply while multiplying the risk of supply instability and outages.

"It's a perfect storm," he said. The market has moved beyond UPS and towards an overarching notion of power continuity, especially as applications like email and POS move to the centre of business operations, Makryllos said.

"Power infrastructure is getting strategic," he said. "Demand for IT is growing 20 per cent per year, and power bills are increasing at the same rate." Customers also now need power protection to deliver backup power for longer periods - half an hour, rather than the five minutes that would have been considered adequate years ago. Makryllos said new APC UPS offers harmonic filtering: a way of steadying the power supply by preventing the power signal from deviating from the desired sine wave shape.

APC is also offering warranty protection to help customers prove they are doing their best to manage gear in an environment where unnecessary equipment risks have been mitigated.

The good news is customers are becoming more aware of the issues, and are keener to mitigate them through an integrated solution, including racks, cooling and UPS as well as around-the-clock support and managed services. That offered genuine and growing opportunities for the channel, Makryllos said.

To combat global warming, energy providers and government are diversifying power generation away from high greenhouse gas-emitting technologies such as coal power.

In Australia, energy from all source types and suppliers is usually fed into the national grid. As articles by Sustainability Centre environmental scientist, Dr Mark Diesendorf, have pointed out, although renewables such as wind power are less reliable than many fossil fuel-based energy sources, grid operators are capable of mitigating those variations by using, say, peak-load backup.

IT vendors are also designing products that help networks better withstand power irregularities. Avocent country manager, Ed Havlik, said the US vendor is one of many working on green initiatives that concentrate on energy efficiency and robustness, often through advanced IT infrastructure and power management.

Intelligent power strips that connected to the server, and systems that enabled server rooms to be managed remotely, could help keep network power up, along with the security to protect them without too much human input, he said.

Customers, Havlik said, are very concerned about the impact climate change could have. "At the same time, governments are going to start making laws about power consumption and everything else, so people are going to have to be cognisant of that," he said.

Avocent kicks off a green initiative campaign for Asia-Pacific partners in April. "In Southern California, we've had rolling blackouts and you can't afford to have that," Havlik said. "And some US power companies are offering incentives to customers to reduce their power footprints."