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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."
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.
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.
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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.
Never heard of suspend? Hybernate?
The story says $36 per desktop computer per year could be saved. Now that sound like a lot of money at a company with 500 desktops ($18,000). But that company will have at least 500 employees and probably more. At 10% more or 550 employees to work those 500 desktop computers, that brings the potential salary increases to about $32 a year. If the average person works 38 hours a week and 48 weeks a year (1842 hours), that's about a penny or less per hour raise.
But it gets even worse. The heat cycles of computers heating up when in use and cooling down when powered off will take a small toll on the life of the computer. So I guess the real question might be is if the computer lasts 2 years instead of 3 or 4 or even 5 years, how many of those would need to be replaced because the Co2 emitted from making the things from scratch outweighed the entire carbon savings from the $36 worth of electricity not in use assuming that the power for those computers don't already come from a Co2-less generating facility. My guess is that an early replacement on any of them will offset any environmental savings which sort of makes this idea more hand waving then anything.
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