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Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs
snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."
before realizing it and moving most stuff except HTPC to VM
God's gift to chicks
Unused PCs computers that are powered on but not in use are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year
How exactly does that happen? What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?
I thought when CPUs emit smoke you have to buy a new one.
Is it just me, or have carbon emissions, that were all the rage in early 2007, are getting much less media attention now. (Unless combined with an economic aspect such as this article.)
Popular environmentalism is people buying solar panels or wind turbines to ease their conscience, but only when they can afford it.
I'm at work, enviro-conscious, and I love my company. So I'll turn my workstation off right n
I think the fundamental problem is that in the West, energy (specifically watts-hours of electricity in this case) have been so cheap in the last few decades as to be effectively free. This is changing now through worldwide recession and the depletion of the easy-to-get fossil fuel. Once electricity prices start seriously ramping up (which they inevitably will), companies will be giving their utility bills a lot more scrutiny.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
So, they can save the cost of a half hour of my salary, by having me spend 10 minutes each day starting up and shutting down my computer?
I could lose $36 worth of productivity in a few days. My desktop and servers stay ON.
Scientists and students alike are allowed to use it freely for their computations. There is a batch submission system, and a whole lot of numerical calculations run on these computers during night. There are a few caveats, though:
All in all, you get lots of CPU, but low reliability. Which is fine for many applications. Additionally, not only you prevent energy wastage, but you also use the hardware more efficiently (so that the brand new quad core of the dpts secretary actually gets used in a reasonable way). :-)
By the way -- our admins hate it, when Windows computers are being switched off. They run the updates at night, as during the day the users are likely to stop an update that takes to long. I was being bashed for switching off computers during night
j.
If I shut down my PC , and save say 500w/h, then my electrical heater uses 500w/h extra to keep the temprature in the room at the same level.
Also, most electrisity here in Norway comes from Hydro-plants.
I was on a contract at a company in Chester who actually disabled the shut down functionality in hundreds of XP machines. The reason overnight updates. crazy the cost of electricity
The ROI article mentions a product which you BUY to shut down your PCs.
I have a free solution:
shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m
You can schedule that at your server to force all computers to shut down at a specified time.
Something along the lines of
for /f "skip=3 tokens=1 delims=\" %m in ('net view') do shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m %m
Now, you could be nice and change -t 0 to something like -t 45 and give any poor sucker at a terminal a chance to shutdown -a, or at least close programs. (There will be one error at the end for the success notice.)
I do not recommend using that on a network without some tweaking: it will also shut down servers which show up in net view. Just a basic idea, and I do use a modified version of it at a couple of sites.
Even a scheduled wol.exe could run to make sure computers are able to run updates overnight.
Or you could push out a group policy that forces suspend after an hour of inactivity, and sets Windows Update to wake the computer to run. No fuss, no muss.
Now, what did all that cost us?
I still can't understand why when my PC is shutdown it draws more than a (compact fluorescent) light bulb... it metered at 19W. 74W on (and idle), 19W off, pathetic!
BTW my cell phone charger didn't register at all....
Oh, that is right, you have to draw less than 20W to put an energy star sticker on it.
will save even more...
if By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year., then I guess that by simply going to work with public transportation and leaving the car at home (or simply not having one) will allow you to leave the computer on (and that of your colleague too)...
I find TFA rather silly given that most modern computers (especially laptops, which are becoming de-facto desktop replacements) consume very little power when left idle...
this is just another excuse by company management or IT admins to force policies on the users...
Can I put a spell on those who can't spell?
Your wheels are loose and they're losing their grip, good you're there.
Use dumb terminals, something like sunrays...
Configure them to shut off when idle instead of run a screensaver, when you power it back on it boots pretty much instantly and the user can re-enter their password (or reinsert their smartcard) and be back where they were, all the session state is stored on the server.
No need to keep machines on overnight for updates, because the terminals are dumb enough not to need updates...
Dumb terminals boot instantly, so no need to keep machines pre loaded to save booting time.
Put a power breaker by the door, last one out can turn the breaker off, first one in can turn it on (they used to do this in our computer labs at college)... There shouldn't need to be anything turned on in an office when there's no people there.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You pay for peaks not valleys. Peak can happen at any time.
Obama's giving a speech, usage goes up 100% VS the same time last week. Knowing 'when' to turn things off is at best a guess.
Powered down PCs don't get regular maintenance, data gathering metrics, and updates (which could be anything from package upgrades to SSH'ing into 1000 machines and running some shell command) that happen to groups of machines. Configuring these machines to catch up when they power back on is not trivial.
Anecdotal evidence has shown that server hardware doesn't like being constantly turned on then off.
The world is getting flatter every day. Predicting low usage is not as easy as what time of day it is anymore. Did you know France was having an election that night?
Your software may cache content while it's running, allowing it to serve content faster. This cache has to either persist after turning the computer off, or you just wait for it to get to a steady state.
We've experimented w/ CPU power saving states, but the time it takes to power back up to full is a noticeable hit, and not all hardware/CPU combination allow this.
------
Hardware is getting better at letting people tune power usage, and power usage is a HUGE $$$ sink, so *trust me* corporations are looking into it. It's just not as easy as "duh, just turn it off". Doable and useful, just not trivial at a large scale.
BTW, we calculate approx 3 years on = buying the computer, counting the AC+power.
Can everyone please turn off their fucking screensavers and just configure your screen to blank out, your monitor to shut off, and suspend the computer if you can too?
Hey geniuses-- there's no point to having your CPU heat up the planet when you create CO2 to run the AC to cool down a room heated by a CPU which is burning fossil fuels to show some stunning complex 3d imagery to absolutely no one in an empty fucking room.
Thanks.
(Oh, and by the way-- SETI@Home is a bullshit waste of time too. It's not like the rest of us are burning vats of gasoline in our backyards to summon unicorns, so please don't fuck up my planet with your random wild-stab-in-the-dark geektard fantasies either. Let's do the math. Odds of SETI@Home finding ET: Who the fuck knows? Odds of SETI@HOME helping to fuck up planet: 100%. Stop it.)
This doesn't take into account the vast, vast amount of time, energy and resources wasted by people who don't know how to use the fucking things properly in the first place. Let's start there before we get to titivating with power-management.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to show people how to do the simplest things, to save them hours of wasted effort each week. This usually leads to me writing explicit instructions and disseminating to those concerned but, ultimately, people just don't care (and I have trained people for a living with notable success, so it's not a "techie-personality pissing people off" thing).
Power-management? How about education. If every office-worker were to spend one day a year going through their daily grind with someone sat beside them who knows how to use their PC's potential (and how to explain it), productivity would double. I'm not just slagging off my luddite colleagues here; I know there are things I could do better, and would genuinely welcome the attention of someone who could show me how.
Sorry to vent my frustrations here, but it's that or do it at work. To put it bluntly: nice study, but frankly you're just pissing in the ocean.
Meta will eat itself
You see our computer has a power supply that makes it an incredible bitch to turn on after you turn it off. We have to open it up to fix it usually.
If the computers take a minute or more to boot up, it's simply not cost effective to turn them off at night.
Overnight, a computer with reasonable powersaving features - monitor off, cpu scaled down, harddrives turned off - will use a few kilowatt hours of power, with power locally available for around 14c per kw/h. Our workers are being paid around 30 cents per minute, just to be there.
Some of the older computers we have in use (3ghz P4s, so not too underpowered) take three or four minutes to boot up, which makes it much cheaper just to leave them on overnight.
The other option is having an automated shutdown after closing and Wake On Lan before anybody arrives in the morning...but as we only have 40 or so work stations, it isn't a huge problem yet.
So I went to the linked article. Still didn't make sense. Especially the phrase "computers that are powered on but not in use." Then I went into the report the story is based on and it finally made sense. According to the report, 50% of people do not turn their computers when they leave work. So the computer stays on all night, or all weekend. Well those people are just fuckin' retarded.
It takes about ten minutes for my PC to boot and for me to start all my programs.
10 minutes * 240 work days = 40 hours a year.
At 5 minutes, that's 20 hours a year. That a lot of wasted productivity to save $30.
So this was on the Reg yesterday, and the comments were all virtually the same, on two variations:
1. The company has to pay people to sit around while PCs power up and down, eliminating any benefit from powering down the PCs since people are so much more expensive.
2. The company pushes updates and such automatically at night when computer/network usage is low, making it less expensive (again, saving money over power saved) than pushing the updates when people turn on their computers in the morning.
I turn most of my computers off at home and work because I hate wasting the power, and I have a problem with my home PC keeping the fan on in sleep mode. On my laptop I put it in sleep mode, plugged into the wall. I have no idea how much power this uses, but I do it so that I get a quick restart in the morning for checking slashdot @ breakfast. It bothers me that I might be wasting a few dollars per month keeping it in sleep rather than hibernate (which doesn't work on my machine - Ubuntu on a IBM T30) or full shutdown.
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As a Linux user I am used to laptops and desktops never quite working because the BIOS power management only works with Windows.
There are two possible reasons for that. One is that the open source software hasn't been written yet to take advantage of published APIs or, another possibility is that the manufacture is hiding it's APIs to make it really difficult to use anything except Windows to manage the system power.
If it is the latter then in it seems to me highly irresponsible on the part of the hardware manufactures. How to save energy when their hardware is not being used is really not something to be hiding for any reason these days.
I realise I don't exactly represent a significant number of users here. I'm just thinking in terms of what I can do to save energy at my own desktop (apart from the obvious switching stuff off when not in use!) and what's in the way. And Windows-centric BIOS's seem to be the main culprit.
are malware-laden Windows boxes at small businesses with little or no regular IT Staff. I did contract IT work for small business a while back and some of the computers I had to deal with were borderline unusable. In some cases, a full reboot meant a full 15 minutes before the computer was in some semblance of working order again. That's definitely enough time to make a less savvy user want to just leave the thing on overnight and only shutdown/reboot when you really had to. And of course many of these folks didn't want to hear about how their super-awesome toolbars were the root of the problem.
Surely they account for a larger amount than desktops. I can point out racks where there is so little access at night I am surprised the drives don't sleep.
I am very sure if you looked at every nook and cranny you can find waste. In business areas this occurs for two reasons, the first "I'm not paying for it" and the second being "too afraid to ask if its ok". You could toss in "too stupid to know" and "no one high up will make a decisions" but it really doesn't matter. Waste is built into the system.
Newer desktops sleep. I don't know of a single desktop where I work that doesn't sleep, let alone the LCD panel goes to sleep as well. So were they playing with old style computers that cannot sleep? I guess there may be a lot of them out there or worse, new ones configured completely wrong.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yes, I have paid handsomely for software which will automatically shut down and restart my computer at appropriate times. There is a bug however, the computer never starts at the time I designate...
Why do people make such a big deal about it. We're all gonna snuff it at some stage anyway. Might as well make the most of things while we still can.
Apart from using CPU frequency scaling, shutting down unused PCs, and using thin clients, you can setup Boinc on your computer.
just think of what all that wasted computer power could do for the grid computing network.
Ouch. Dude, if you need to lose 15 to 20 minutes (let alone 45) to restart your PC, something is terminally wrong with your setup. Vista on a 486?
Even in such pathological case, wouldn't suspend or hibernate be an option?
I always power down my (work or home) PC when I expect to not need it for a while. Initiating hibernation takes me 2 seconds, resuming 30 to 40s in the rare instances when the machine is not already up again by the time I get back to it, or if I need to VPN into it.
I'm using Linux (Ubuntu 8.10, doesn't matter much), shutting down via 's2disk'. Basically, it's hibernate, ie all applications etc are saved to disk in whatever state they happen to be, no need to exit any etc... /fast/.
s2disk uses compression by default, so while it may take a bit longer for the machine to actually finish writing everything to disk and power down (who cares), resumes are
Powering back up is usually triggered via the BIOS' RTC alarm, scheduled every weekday shortly before I'm expected to arrive at work. Worst case (say I'm there early), my PC is ready with all my apps running in less than 40s, time I may need anyway to check my voicemail etc.
Remote access via my company SonicWALL SSL-VPN is also a breeze, since this gateway can issue Wake-on-LAN to whatever one wants to get to.
Reducing waste in general is IMHO just being responsible.
"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Let this be a lesson. Don't stay in a sealed room with a PC. You will suffocate.
Save Energy! Conversation is Cool! *Powers down server without telling anyone 12 hours before big final project is due.*
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I don't think that this is in the company's best interest. $36 a year is 10c a day, and even if the machine boots in 1 minute, that's ~$20/60 = 33c of wasted employee time. So there's not that much incentive (carbon trading may change this). I'd be interested to see the effect of Sleep mode, however, as that boots much faster.
I dont know why someone hasnt designed an easier to setup method to have pc's wake on lan signal boot the hard drive, so that systems can be powered on at 5am or such, prior to folks getting to work.
That would eliminate most folks problems of waiting for their computer to boot up when they get to work.
I once got a call to setup an unused PC for a new user. I asked the caller to turn it on and give me the IP address.
The pc was already on. The previous user had left the company two months before and just logged out and turned the *monitor* off.
Nobody in that office noticed it'd been running all this time.
When my wife bangs her mouse around at home complaining it takes so long for the "screensaver" to give back her desktop. Clearly, the place she works hasn't set any power saving on their machines or she would know what is going on. I believe with about 500 employees at their peak last year, maybe they could have fired a couple fewer on their recent rounds of layoffs if they had actually used power saving.
I can tell you from experience in a large security-conscious organization that such pathological setups are not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think. The combination of antivirus and extremely aggressive login scripts bring fairly modern hardware with XP Pro to its knees on startup.
When I or any of my coworkers have to cold boot, or often even just whenever we dock an already booted laptop, it means a minimum of 5-10 minutes enforced coffee break. If you're actually in a hurry to get something for someone standing in your office, it can sure seem like 30 min.
The worst is when it boots up and tells you 10 minutes later that it's done installing some software update the login scripts had for it, so now you need to reboot. Or rather, that it's going to reboot in 30 seconds, and there's nothing you can do.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)
Sorry for the followup, just wanted to clarify:
That's 5 to 10 minutes before Explorer or the start menu will respond to mouse events, not 5 to 10 minutes before the apps I need to use are open and ready to use.
After a torturously long OS boot, I get to wait for visual studio to start up, which takes nearly as long. Add on outlook, Groove, etc, and I'd say the original poster isn't too far off on 15-20 minutes before the computer is ready to do any real work.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)
And any company THAT bothered by this would be using more power-efficient PC's anyway. Face it, 99% of staff using a computer as part of their daily work don't need a full desktop PC and certainly don't need dual-core systems with Gbs of RAM. So instead of faffing about trying to recoup some of the loss from buying that terrible hardware in the first place (monetary costs, environmental costs, maintenance costs, etc.) they would be much better off buying some low-power desktops (like the Atom's, Via's etc.) and thus not pumping most of their electricity into heat wastage, fans, office cooling, etc. when they could just have a small 60W or so (maximum) PC that does the same jobs.
Those who are committed to their existing hardware - well, they should have been specifying and testing WOL, ACPI sleep, etc. in the first place if they wanted to make sure it worked in their particular environment. Chances are those stuck on old machines will have more problems trying to get the PC to sleep and to wake on cue than they would have just to buy a new cheap desktop. My pet hate is machines that won't WOL without having first been turned on manually - a power cut overnight (when the machines aren't on) means that the PC's just sit there and ignore WOL packets. And that is on fairly recent hardware (2 years old?). I know it's "wake" on LAN, but a full boot and complete shutdown (not sleep mode) will let it respond to WOL packets forever until the power disappears again.
I would hazard a guess that the following ALL save more power than would be saved by shutting off PC's overnight for a lot less hassle and inconvenience:
- Cutting off background services in Windows.
- Replacing hardware with more modern equipment.
- Disabling, centralising and/or just changing vendor of the antivirus programs to use less CPU, disk-access, etc.
- Replacing 10% of computers with a low-power alternative (even a laptop!)
- Turning off WAP's and other unnecessary networking hardware overnight.
- Turning the room temperature up/down by half a degree permanently (depending on the outside environment)
- Installing doors that shut themselves to keep hot/cold air in.
- Opening a couple of blinds/curtains to let sunlight into some of the less-used but still heated areas (cold-countries only) or fitting blinds/curtains to reduce the heat taken in from outside (hot-countries only).
- Training users to use shortcut keys instead of clicking the mouse for everything.
- Or removing that poxy plasma TV in the company reception which is on permanent loop playing to nobody.
The thing is, we take power so much for granted that when we get told to "save" it, we worry over the little bits (energy-saving bulbs) and completely forget about the larger draws (heating / cooling). $36 / year / PC is nothing, no matter the scale of the company. Even a 100 PC office (which could theoretically save $3600 / year) will probably spend multiples of that on heating/cooling, bringing someone in to do the work, or make multiples of that amount by selling off some of their old IT kit, fitting those light fittings that only switch on if someone is actually in an office, etc.
Getting businesses to understand means providing a valid, comparable reason. That normally means *money*. But even the green-friendly companies will save much, much, much, much more money by just replacing el-cheapo PC World computer with a decent low-power one and then selling off the old kit. If you do it right, you would even MAKE money by doing this (I know it's about £200/unit for a decent mini-ITX machine, and you could easily get that for a recent second-hand machine of good spec).
It's a *waste* of time. The proportion of power you save does not justify the effort to do it, especially not when a tiny, unnoticeable adjustment to a thermostat saves ten times the amount of power, and the hassle associated with implementing power-friendly PC's does not justify the end. Put a sign up and send a memo round to staff to turn off their PC
OK, so you turn off your PC's at night. And when do you run updates? Try running updates and patches during the day in most environments and you'll get lynched by the users.
Yes, there is Wake-on-LAN, but the technology is still spotty. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and Im sure you're using some juice keeping the card alive to respond to the WoL request.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
It dosn't matter. You can have a 15000 person panel of 'experts' on saving money and energy prove to a single company that they are wasting money, and could save 30% of their operating costs by powering down said unused computer.
but your typical large company IT group wont hear it. They want all the PCs turned on when their not in use.
I know, i work at one such company, that could save ~35% of their building operating costs if they turn off the machines not in use OVER NIGHT, and turn off the lights in the callcenters OVER NIGHT. but nope, they wont hear it.
The article said:
and
When I multiply $36 in savings per PC times the 108 Million PCs being described, I get a possible savings of $3.88B, or about $1B more than the original article reported. We "waste" $2.8B, but we can "save" $3.88B by turning off unused PCs and practicing power management? Are the savings or the waste over-estimated? One has to be wrong...
Ken
One of the reasons the machines don't get turned off is the expensive 5 minutes wasted by boot times. It's an irritating waste of precious time as you return from lunch or start work in the morning, it discourages turning off boxes at night, and it discourages turning off boxes during the day when unused.
Unfortunately, this is partly the fault of Microsoft (who enourage stupid, resource gobbling behavior at boot time like frequent resource scanning by update software and unnecessary disk indexing), and BIOS's that use ancient, proprietary, and frankly broken tools to scan for hardware that hasn't been used in 10 years. The OLPC very successfully uses a LinuxBIOS and booting procedure that cuts this lengthy pause to seconds: it should be on every server and most desktops in the country, but motherboard makers are very reluctant to support it for various reasons. As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to fear of intellectual property issues involving ancient BIOS utilities, and unwillingness to publish their own hardware knowledge associated with their own particular component selection.
I'd love to see ASUS use LinuxBIOS by default. I've actually been asked to do that for deployments: it wasn't mature enough to use yet at that time, but it seems much more stable now and of higher quality than the average new motherboard BIOS.
Never heard of suspend? Hybernate?
Hibernate takes as long as cold booting because it has to restore the entire contents of RAM. In a 64-bit machine, this 4 GB compulsory miss can take two minutes or more. If I use suspend, audio won't play until I restart the PC due to a driver defect.
...that this article should come up the day after they implemented a policy of turning all desktop equipment off at my workplace, a global, american owned callcentre business.
I've been turning my computer off for years when i end for the day, i don't find it a strain. Though so far they've been starting the computers at night somehow, WOL or something, so it hasn't had much effect and i never have to sit through POST and the OS boot.
The number of times I've seen someone oh-so-slowly type in a piece of data they have in an email right in front of their face just stuns me.
Are you sure that the piece of data wasn't received in a PDF with the "copy text" permission turned off or perhaps in a PDF of a scanned page with no OCR?
I've some coworkers whose PCs would be more productive turned off... I won't even go into their environmental impact... [shudder!] --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
"but what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?"
Generally inefficient and badly writtten code plus the OS having to load layers upon layers of libraries because the programming was too fucking clueless and/or lazy to program anywhere close to the metal. Its not just Windows you see this in - FOSS is full of it too. How many times have you downloaded what should be some utility app only for it to require libholdmyhand.so , libdrawlinesonscreen.so and on and so because the code is a witless code monkey who couldn't hack his way out of a paper bag and used 3rd party libraries to do the simplest things.
Duh.
I'm reasonably sure I can recognize a PDF. 8)
Only $2.8 billion? I was worried for a second there.
I do recall plants emitting co2 as well, maybe we should shop them all up? Wait... Then we'd all die... Similar to computers in that way for me :D
They run BOINC or SETI@home or Folding@home
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The original article has this at the end:
The Forrester report "How Much Monday are Your Idle PCs Wasting?" is available for $279.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.
Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.
How dare you call these PCs unused... They're part of my botnet you insensitive clods !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
What is $36 per year compared to the 3 minutes per day of employee time wasted to wait for their PC to boot...
... it hurt too.
Find something worth writing about.
Let's see...
1. Where I live, it's all hydro-electricity.
2. I have a Mac mini, which takes less than 2 watt in sleep mode. The CPU is a laptop-category Core 2 Duo, so it's very efficient even while under full load.
3. Profit!
Any story that mentions CO2 "savings" is a waste of everyone's time. How can I filter them out?
Our office does not have usage metering, it has demand metering. Turning off all the PCs at night will have no effect on our bill.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
...that is only one side of the issue. Corporate IT disable sleep/hibernation and want users to turn off their computers every day so that updates/upgrades are automatically installed the next morning by startup scripts. That makes the startup process very long and the computer mostly unresponsive during that time (a system anti-virus scan is also often scheduled at boot time), which is annoying to the users. Therefore, users "forget" to turn off their computers when they check out.
Unused PCs - computers that are powered on but not in use - are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year,
Ha! Get a journalism degree! Or a PC that emits no CO2! That statement appears to be incorrect, though likely IS NOT A LIE.
There is a huge, huge difference between old PCs with CRTs (or even new ones with LCDs, but substantially less so) and something like a thinclient.
Long story short, switching over from fairly old PCs to thinclients in an organization which doesn't buy new equipment all that often will see the organization saving the cost of the thinclients in a handful of years in power use alone.
Yes, there's the server side to consider, but realistically: it'll still cost less in overall licensing, the hardware costs are lower overall, the power use is night-and-day (many/most TCs use less than 2-3 watts in operation), and there is a much lower maintenance/management cost involved.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If companies were using thin clients, it should be an easy decision to switch it off, because the wake up time is in seconds rather than minutes.
IMO this is a usability problem; When no-one (including my processes) is using a computer, it should switch off automatically. And wake up when I come back.
The same applies to lights, heating, ... with intelligent energy management.
Maybe even bigger problem is that I drive to work instead of working from home using a virtual world...
108 Million Machines
2.8 billion dollars per year
More than $1000 per machine per year?
In winter time watts used to power appliancws that are turned on means less watts needed for the heater.
I know winter is supposed to have ended, but somebody forgot to tell the weather. It snowed in the last 24 hours.
There was a talk at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage by a guy who developed a software called WakeUpManager as part of his bachelor thesis. It manages the booting and shutdown of computers by a central server that allows users to define timetables of required uptime via a web interface and also checks if nobody is using the computer before it shuts it down. Users can boot shut-down machines from remote via the same web interface (by Wake on LAN). There is an audio recording of the talk, but it is in German. The software is already used at the University of Paderborn with 150 clients. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to collect any data on the savings that were achieved in this installation.
I keep my work PC on for 4 reasons
1) I can pick up where I left off the evening before ...
2) I can VPN in to my work machine if there is an emergency I have to fix.
3)
4) Profit!
ooooooh, Co2, yeah, you better watch that "deadly toxin", those nasty little plankton put out a billion tons of it a day. Lets exterminate them. Lets tax those nasty plankton.
You better kill yourself to save the planet, us nasty humans exhale it daily.
You gotta watch those nasty little plankton, they put out a billion tons of CO2 a day. Lets tax them, and stop them from causing global warming, or is it global cooling now? I can't keep track of what they call it anymore... cooling... warming... whatever.
Ohhhh, Lord Rothschild, I want you to pass a carbon tax to end the CO2 that we exhale. No.? Just exterminate us all so that you can save the planet from us nasty CO2 exhalers.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I've implemented a similar thing at UTK. I named it the "arbiter," and the EEB department uses it to run simulations across desktops, etc.
However, I understood the unreliable nature of such a "cluster," and built the system to restart killed and unresponsive jobs. So far we've been able to process over 12,000 runs over the system.
It's been a huge help to us.
I have a Linux machine and a Windows machine idling away under my desk at work 24/7. I often work in the office but use both of these desktops when I work from home. When something goes bump in the night I can log into these work machines and be able to get things done. If they were powered off it would limit my ability to do my job as there is a lot of special software that I need. The $36 a year savings is easily eaten up by lost productivity with workers without the software they need to perform their jobs. That $36 a year savings is also eaten up by having to purchase and support laptop's for employees. The $36 a year would also get eaten up by buying licenses for software for home users.
I'd say I have to unpredictably access my workstation during non-business hours two to three times per week. I wonder what emits more carbon per year, a 200W constant load or spending 86 hours driving?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year
Actually, that's news to me. I wasn't aware that PCs off-gassed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'd say that the reason companies are switching to 4-day workweeks is that NOT PAYING YOUR EMPLOYEES for one day every one or two weeks makes a bigger difference.
Most companies these days that move to 4-day weeks aren't doing 4x10 hour days -- they're keeping the daily hours the same and putting through what amounts to a pay cut via the reduced hours of not having that 5th workday.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
I am all for conservation. It is an essential cog in the "energy independence" goal. But perhaps companies can put all those unused clock cycles to profitable use. I know organizations and universities have huge distributed computing programs set up, using many computers to work on one problem. I log onto the Galaxy Zoo 2 now and then and help ID galaxies. But a smart entrepreneur could figure out a way to make MONEY using those computers. Participating companies would get their cut, usable for anything, including paying the power bill. Comments?
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
The heat from idling PCs isn't wasted during the heating season. For every PC that is turned off, you will have to spend more energy running the building heating system. Waste only occurs if you are running an air conditioner (cooler) to carry the heat away.
Schools are huge for this. And they have an even shorter 'office hours' so the time the computers are unused is even longer.
The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."
This "myth" is NOT a myth. Yes, I know of all the "discussions", and the Mythbusters episodes, but there are plenty of other circumstances at play in a commercial environment.
Example: I work at a remote site with about a dozen machines. Our main data center is locate 12 miles away. We frequently have to perform updates and changes to our systems at the remote site, but they can't happen during production hours.
So each night we all leave our computers running... so that IT can remotely login to do updates, etc.
It will actually cost MORE in terms of environmental damage to turn off our computers each night, since updating would require a person to get into a car and drive to the site to do the updates. That car will put out more pollution during the drive, not to mention the pollution generated to refine the gas for the trip, than will be produced by a "dirty" electric plant.
And in addition, our remote data center is powered 90% by a local renewable energy company that uses a variety of wind, hydro, and solar to generate.
So it's not always a myth that leaving the computers on saves energy, as long as you look at the entire picture.
Given that the average desktop takes anywhere between 1 minute and 10 to actually become usable, just how much power is wasted just waiting? I mean, if you're going to check out costs that don't contribute to productivity (like me typing this message, but I digress) this strikes me as a major one.
Even those that power down at the down of the day have this waste built in.
It seems that a quick bootup would do more than just cater for my impatience :-).
Insert
how sad all this gibberish is. if google would just power down 1 day a week they would use 1/7 as much power. so what? This is is all so meainingless. why do you worry about what someone else is doing? has the life of the individual become so meainingless and boring that they all need to sit around and fret about everyone else? mind your own business and pay your own bills and stop being such whiney pussies.
Sorry, the US (and I suspect much of Western Europe) isn't going to be able to conserve their way out of a power crisis. We haven't built any large power plants in decades - all that has been done is some smaller "peaker" plants designed to start during periods of high load.
Well, the folks running air conditioners haven't gotten the word about electric power being a scarce resource. We can't build power plants because of environmental impact. We will soon not have 100% of the power we would like because of the same reason.
Growth in power usage is inevitable. It has been growing steadily since the first generator was turned on. No matter how many conservative we are, we can't counter the growth of the last 20-30 years.
Sadly for folks in the US, it is too late. It would take at least five years to build a major coal-fired power plant. It would take 10 years or more to build a major nuclear power plant. We don't have five years before rationing is going to be necessary.
So what does Google do when they can only operate for 10 hours a day in California?
Our company has taken cutting costs pretty seriously, down to the penny. We've been asked to turn off our machines at night. I decided to setup to have my machine slowly turn things off over a matter of hours, in case I forget to turn my computer off when I'm away for a while. I also used to standby, but now I hibernate. I know the savings are probably minuscule, but every little bit helps. If I ever need access to my machine away from the office, I just WOL and remote it, then shutdown when I'm done. It really doesn't require much more effort.
And then there goes your discrepancy.
Then again, we in the UK do maths. We can manage more than one sum.
Probably the power cost is higher, but to do the real ROI, they need to examine the number of additional computer failures that will occur and the cost (both in $$$ and in CO2) that will be required to replace them.
Every time you cycle the power on a computer you shorten it's life. Shut off every one of these computers every night and you will probably have a million more dead PCs/year...
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
I built a Windows XP pc for my wife. It has ASUS mobo and AMD proc, a ups and is set to hibernate. That ended soon because after a month it was taking windows like 5-7 minutes to come out of hibernation.
Next step was to get Sleep working using just 6-7 watts rather than 150 watts. That worked fine for about 6 months and then she and I both experienced corrupt local profile/registry. Note this is not on a domain and has no group policies pushed to it or managed. All drivers were up to date. I would say Windows does not work good in hibernation mode or sleep.
So later after more issues with windows I gave her my old Mac Mini and it sleeps with 1 watt of power, wakes up via the bluetooth keyboard or mouse and has yet to lock hard and trash her user settings. This tells me Apple hardware can sleep and hibernation with no issues were Windows cannot.
Both Mac and Windows used the fast user switching. I would say that PC users could save a LOT of power each month by purchasing a mac. My Macbook computer I never shut off or shutdown unless a security update requires a reboot. I just close the lid and it goes to sleep, when I need to use it I open the lid and in less than 5 seconds I am on my wireless network connected to the internet.
This summer she will get a new Mac so I can sell the old one.
$2.8 billion? that's potato chip.
and in this economy downtown we need to spend as much as possible to increase the aggregate demand
I cannot help with the no OCR, but at my home situation, I always just strip off the added protection. Easiest thing is to download one of the 10/20 dollar shareware programs that do this. Once you've got the password, converting the pdf is a breezer, especially if you've one of those programs that simply add an item to the right click on the PDF in explorer... Bugger that copy protection BS. If you can read it you can copy it.
Nice setup to still be able to get to the computers from remote, but what hibernate doesn't do is keep you long lived network connections alive. More like X and ssh connections that I always have going. I have my systems to hibernate when the power is off and the UPS is lower than half power. Keeping the local programs up beats shutting down and loosing them, and there's a chance if all the systems go down and back up about the same time the network connections will stay up.
Hire someone to turn off all the unused computers. Problems solved.
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In summer, the reverse happens. The kilowatts of heat from those running (for nothing) PCs have to be exhausted by the air-conditioning. The worst culprit is the LCD display, which consumes many more watts then did the older large CRTs.
The big laugh in Quebec are the energy efficient bulbs, which, in winter save zero kilowatts and in summer, with long daylight hours, are hardly used. It is better for us to use incandescent lamps then these mini-florescent bulbs that cause problems for ground-fill, or are distributed pollutents that the next generation will have to deal with.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Coal plants alter their power levels all the time.
They just can't do it fast. Typically they make about 2% more steam than they need. This handles the transient spikes. As demand picks up they increase the feed rate for the powdered coal, this boils water faster, requiring more feed water. Steam goes to turbine at faster rate, putting more torque on generator shaft to compensate for the increased emf back force from the increased demand.
when the plant is not used at capacity, the parasitic losses (power to keep the plant itself running) are a larger fraction of the total. Less efficient.
When the plant is used at over capacity, you have higher pressure losses in the turbine, hotter steam coming out. Less efficient. But the power curve has a pretty broad top.
Seasonally they put units on and off line.
They can also put a unit in idle mode. It makes steam, it spins the turbine, but there is no load on the turbine, so it takes very little steam. But everything is hot. I think from an idle to full power is only about 2 hours
We have a 10 MW hydro plant on our grid. It generally only releases water during 2 hours during the day, all clustered in the times that power generation is spiking, and most of that in 20 to 30 second spikes.
Unlike a power plant which takes about 48 hours to go from cold to full production, a dam can do this in seconds. When I did the tour there, I could watch the gate actuators for the squirrel cage turbine. They were constantly moving, several times per minute between about 1/4 power and full power. By using the dam this way, they were able to reduce that 2% just in case over production of steam to some smaller number.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.