Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » Report: 62.4 million work PCs left awake during off-hours

June 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Report: 62.4 million work PCs left awake during off-hours

TAGS: Power consumption

Not to belabor my writings about desktop-power management, but according to a study released today, as many as 62.4 million PCs are left on during evening and weekend hours at companies across the United States, which results in around $1.72 billion of wasted power (assuming even just 50 percent can be put into hibernation or sleep mode).

Those figures come from a report released today titled "PC Energy Report 2007: United States," composed by Harris Interactive and sponsored by 1E, which provides systems management tools -- including solutions for managing PC power consumption -- and the Alliance to Save Energy.

The report says that "a mid-sized company wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight."

From an ecological standpoint, according to the report, leaving a PC on overnight creates 920 pounds of carbon dioxide. "If 60 percent of the country's work PCs are used this way — and 50 percent use hibernation or sleep mode — then 14.4 million tons of carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere each year, needlessly. Preventing that amount of CO2 from reaching the atmosphere would have roughly the same impact as taking 2.58 million passenger cars -- more than exist in the entire State of Maryland (2.48 million )-- off the road entirely."

"Ideally, everybody would shut down their PCs at the end of a working day. Research we have commissioned shows that this doesn't happen," writes Sumir Karayi, CEO of IE in the introduction of the report. "Some people assume their IT departments need their machines to be left on overnight in order to deploy security patches and software updates. Others believe an on-board 'sleep' or hibernation mode kicks in, which isn't usually the case. And an alarming number of people admit that they just don't care."

According to the report, "more than 30 percent of employees cite the IT department's policies or activities as reason for not shutting down computer each night."

As I wrote last week, there are, in fact tools out there that enable companies to easily set PCs and monitors to power down when not in use -- and remotely awoken if they need to be patched, backed up, and/or to be ready for use when end-users return to the office the next day.

Posted by Ted Samson on June 18, 2007 02:55 PM

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