Lowering computer power consumption

Ben Kus: Hi, my name is Ben Kus and I am with BigFix, Incorporated. I am the Senior Directory of Technology.

Today we are going to be talking about lowering computer power consumption. Specifically, we're going to be talking about wasted electricity for computers.

One of the best ways to illustrate what I mean about wasted electricity for computers is to look at computer power consumption over a one year period and see how much power a computer actually uses. If you have a computer that is on for a whole year at full power, it tends to use about 1,200 kW of electricity and depending on how much you pay for power that goes to about $120 or about 1,600 pounds of CO2 that is created just to make that power.

So where do these numbers come from? We're using industry averages around how much electricity a computer or monitor uses. These numbers will vary significantly, but it's generally in this range. In addition, we are using CO2 stats from the EPA over a year period which tells that when you generate one kW hour of electricity it turns into about 1.4 pounds of CO2.

And for comparison, a car, on average, will create about five times the CO2 from its exhaust and you would have to plant roughly and acre of trees to absorb somewhere around four tons the CO2. So bear these numbers in mind as we go through these statistics.

To go back to our spectrum, in a standard work week of about 40 hours, a person needs to sit in front of a computer for about a quarter of the total time of the week to do work. If they were to turn their computer off when they go home every day, you would find that they would use somewhere around 300 kW hours which would cost about $30 and spit out about 400 pounds of CO2 to generate that power.

Most people don't like to turn off their computers because they have to go through and turn them on in the morning which takes time and they lose their applications that are open. Computer manufacturers invented what is known as low power mode.

In low power mode computers will use significantly less power than in full power mode but still a little bit. If a computer is on during the work week and then is on in lower power mode for nights and weekends, it will use somewhere around 500 kW hours, cost about $50, and spit out about 700 pounds of CO2 to create that power.

This area here, from the low power mode to the 100 percent, is the area that we call waste. The reason why is that the computer is sitting there, it's using power, nobody is sitting in front of it, it's just pure wasting of electricity.

So why don't companies use the low power mode? It seems like a great thing to do. The reason is that there are some very serious complexities around implementing low power mode in any organization.

The first is that users will go through and disable their power settings. It's very common. Most users find it annoying that the screen will turn off or their computer will turn off when they go away to meetings, and so they'll go through and actually disable the power settings themselves.

Perhaps more importantly, IT operations disable power settings very commonly in organizations. The reason they do that is because when a computer is off, or is in low power mode, it can't be updated. So what they do is they disable the power settings for the whole period of time so that it can spend that one day a week or whatever it may be to update the computers.

The good news is that there are solutions to these complexities. Specifically, it is possible to centralize power management settings of all computers in a company so that they can be set in one area in the policy of the settings can be maintained.

Second, there is a technology called wake on LAN which will allow you to remotely wake up a computer. So if it is time to do things like the security patches and updates, you can remotely power that computer on and then do the updates and then power it down again.

Any company that implements these solutions has some significant benefits. Specifically, they have some very serious costs savings. Going back to our numbers here, you can see the difference between a full power computer and a computer that is only powered on during the work day; it can be right around $90. So depending on where you are on the spectrum, you can save up to $90 and that is significant for any organization.

And second are the environmental benefits. There are tens of millions of computers in the US and hundreds of millions in the world and if they all implement the power management savings and reduce that waste, then the amount of electricity saved will reduce the amount of CO2 and benefit us all.