This post is partially motivated by my colleague(I hope he is not reading this) who spent all his Christmas and New year Vacations at home with his PC still running next to my desk. I am amazed to calculate how much electricity he just wasted. Well, you wouldn’t leave your television ON for all day while you are at the office, and yet, across the world, millions of work PCs are left on all night—wasting energy, costing owners millions in utility costs, and contributing to global climate change.

Generating the electricity needed to power those computers requires hundreds of power plants that produce billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Many of those machines sit idle for 12 to 16 hours per day, burning electricity, but not doing any work, because businesses habitually leave their computers running overnight.So how much does this one click matters? Here is an awesome report published by Harris Interactive some time back.

Some Numbers Worth Understanding

A mid-sized company with nearly 10000 PCs,  wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight. By turning these computers off, an employer can keep more than 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere.  Across the nation(read USA), this adds up to more than $1.72 billion dollars and almost 15 million tons of CO2 . When calculated using EPA’s  Green House Calculator the emitted Carbon is equivalent to  Annual CO2 emissions of  4  coal fired power plants.

As of April 2007,  145,800,000 Americans have full-time jobs. 72 percent of all employed adults regularly use a PC for work purposes at their jobs. Combining these findings suggests that more than 104 million workers reach the end of the work day with a PC to shut off—or not to. Next most important things is to analyse the reason for this type of behavior from the office goers.

Workers Attitudes behind this Wastage:

In an enterprise like situation, when asked whose responsibility it should be to save energy in the workplace, 28 percent of PC users said it should be down to management or the IT department. More than half (53 percent) said they were not at all concerned about their companies’ carbon footprints, indicating that effecting change in “shut down” practices at the behavioral level might yield disappointing results.

Making Business Out of IT:

Almost all the industries (be it mid or large sized) are facing similar challenges of harnessing maximum output with minimum power and infrastructural expenditures. And with global recession the idea of Cost cuttings also include supervised use of Power and Infrastructures in the enterprises and commercial centers. No  company likes to waste money. On the surface, the financial impact of 24-hour computer power consumption may seem insignificant compared to traditional concerns such as payroll, supply, and rent—but the waste is actually substantial. A few important findings from enterprise point of view :

• Energy costs—typically 10 percent of the corporate technology budget—could rise to as much as 50 percent in the next few years.
• If not exaggerating, a good  Power management software can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 80 percent, allowing companies to save between $25 – $75 per desktop PC.
• Turning off PCs, with their heat-intensive power supplies, will also reduce the load on air conditioning equipment, leading to even more energy savings.

If you are working in/for an enterprise, its your responsibility to turn off/hibernate  your PC when you are not working. On the funnier side, Gary Hird, IT strategy manager at UK retailer, John Lewis, says “I joined the company in 1989 and one of the first things I noticed was that every light switch had a sticker next to it, reading ‘switch off, you’re burning my bonus” .

But on a Serious Note “It takes between 60 and 300 trees to absorb the yearly CO2 emissions generated by a single PC left on 24 hours a day. That means it would take between 1.24 and 6.24 billion trees to absorb the emissions caused by the nation’s office computers that are never shut down.”

Take one step towards being Green, try to hibernate the PC whenever possible.

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“For those new to Tech IT Easy who could obviously not remember the initial announcement, Anand Kishore Raju is a new blogger on Tech IT Easy, who will focus on providing you with analyses of greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0. Anand, the floor is now yours…”

The debate on climate change has moved beyond an argument about whether it is happening or not, to a discussion about what can be done to tackle its root causes. Pollution and energy savings are keywords that are becoming more and more of interest to people and to governments across the globe, and the research community is also becoming more sensible towards these topics.

McKinsey & Co. recently reported that the world’s 44 Million servers* consume about 0.5 percent of total electricity productions across the globe and emits about 80 megatons of Carbon Dioxide a year, which is nearly the emissions of entire countries like Argentina or the Netherlands (Data needs an Update ).

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Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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