PC power management - cutting carbon and costs

Expert comment by Mike Hooper, IT Energy

More and more areas of the business are being considered by law firms seeking to reduce their company-wide carbon emissions. Overall the IT sector will increase its carbon emissions by 6 per cent per year with PC ownership quadrupling to four billion devices by 2020 and emissions doubling, according to a 2008 report by The Climate Group. This compares with around 3 per cent growth in the aviation sector.

One computer that remains on but inactive for most, if not all of the time, is not of any great significance. However, when we look at the issue for an organisation as a whole with many machines, this becomes a bigger issue. The energy wasted by PCs has been shown in a number of law firms to run into hundreds of thousands of kW/h and could equal tens of thousands of pounds wasted annually.

Encouraging action

There are three main approaches to reducing energy consumption across a law firms PC estate:

Encouraging users to power down their machines with periodic 'switch off' campaigns
Develop and deploy in-house scripts to carry out a strict shut down policy
Use a third-party software solution to implement customised power policies

Encouraging users to power down their PCs may be inexpensive and appear to only be a case of sending emails or leaving messages telling them to power down. The effectiveness of a communications campaign has been seen to wane over a period of months. There is no easy way of ensuring lawyers will comply with such policies and it is difficult to measure concomitant energy savings. Microsoft platforms provide very basic power management within the operating system and mostly these are disabled. Only a small percentage of PCs currently have power-management settings enabled and it is likely any savings would be reduced as PCs are replaced and users themselves disable power management settings.

Using scripts can be effective in capturing small energy savings. However they can also pose problems that affect productivity as working in the legal sector regularly requires hours outside the traditional 9-5 and shutdown scripts cannot cater for these scenarios, offer user bypass notifications or ensure that unsaved open documents are saved before shutdown occurs. Because of these and other factors, using shutdown scripts provide a fraction of the savings available and do not allow for savings to be measured.

Software solutions

There are commercial solutions that focus on managing PC energy. Software like 1E Nightwatchman and Verdiem SURVEYOR can address all of these problems.

Legal Sector Alliance founder members Irwin Mitchell and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer have both chosen Verdiem SURVEYOR as their preferred solution. Freshfields announced in 2007 that it would become carbon neutral. As part of the process to achieve this, Stacey Collins, Freshfields’ energy manager, approached the IT department to suggest they look at ways to reduce power consumption across the PC estate.

He explains:

'IT Energy (our Verdiem partner) conducted an energy audit using SURVEYOR to uncover usage patterns and software compatibility. The resulting data provided the firm with detailed reports on how much energy could be saved across the desktop PC environment. Following a short pilot of PCs within the IT department, it was clear the Verdiem SURVEYOR solution would meet all our operational needs.'

The Freshfields project took three weeks to roll out Verdiem to 5,566 PCs across 20 global sites.

In the first year of using SURVEYOR Freshfields produced the following results:

Saving 922,268 kWh of energy
Saving 396,575kg Co2
Saving £85,000 Energy Costs

In addition to saving nearly a megawatt of energy per year, the project reduced company wide Co2 equivalent emissions by just over 4 per cent.

Mike Hooper, IT Energy

Founded in 2006, IT Energy was the UK’s first systems integrator focused solely on Green IT within the workplace. IT Energy uses its expertise to help organisations make immediate power and resource savings in the workplace.

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