Cameron C. asks

I think my business can benefit from a better power management policy. Any suggestions on how I can approach this?

Cost of corporate desktop power mismanagement: $2.8 billion

Over the past several years, the companies that run large data centers have become extremely energy conscious, as the price of electricity has forced them to measure and reduce the amount of power they burn through. Server farms are obvious targets for efficiency measures, as the energy use occurs in one place and the hardware is relatively easy to manage. But data centers are far from the only place where organizations host their computing equipment; although individual desktops may be widely distributed, they’re often quite numerous. A new survey attempts to put a price tag on the lack of energy-management practices in the desktop computing segment and comes up with a figure of roughly $2.8 billion wasted in the US alone.

As in many cases where there’s an eye-popping dollar figure involved, the report is using the figure to try to convince its readers to take the matter seriously. In this case, the data was crunched by 1E, a company that sells energy management software for corporate PCs. The company is using it as part of an energy awareness campaign that it is undoubtedly hoping will increase the use of its products. Most of the figures, however, like average price for power in the countries involved, are pretty easy to check, so 1E has little to gain by massaging its numbers. The report is liberally sprinkled with footnotes that describe where its authors obtained various figures as well.

What is more likely to be problematic is the source of employee-behavior data when it comes to desktop computer use. Those numbers come from an online poll performed by Harris Interactive in the US, the UK, and Germany. Harris focuses on this sort of polling, and presumably does it well, but the method will inevitably involve a degree of self-selection and demographic skewing within the population that responds. With that caution out of the way, none of the self-reported behavior derived from the polling looks unreasonable, or even unexpected.

The most basic numbers indicate that a significant majority of employees use a computer at work–just under three-quarters in the US, and nearly 80 percent in the UK and Germany. Of these users, only half shut the computer down when they leave work at night (the rates are slightly higher in Europe). Based on these figures and typical energy use and prices, 1E generated typical numbers for a 10,000-employee company in each of the three countries it surveyed: $260,000 for a US-based company, £168,000 ($244,000) for the UK, and euro-285,000 ($386,000) in Germany. That’s a lot of potential savings left on the table.