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.

What’s somewhat surprising is the fact that more of the same individuals were careful about shutting their computer down at home, with numbers running 15 to 20 percent higher outside the workplace. The survey looked into some of the reasons for the difference in behavior. When it comes to powering down, they were roughly evenly split. About 40 percent of the respondents did so for IT-based reasons, such as security and company policy; another 40 or so did it to save on the electric bill or for environmental reasons. There were some differences among the nations, however. Only about 20 percent the US workers focused on the power use, while they thought that shutting down would help their computer perform better at double the rate of Europeans. Meanwhile, about 30 percent of those in the UK shut down for the environment, a figure nearly triple the rate of the US.

When it comes to leaving it on, only about 10 percent did so because of IT policy or to allow remote access to their files; another 10 percent or so left it on for software patches. The remainder was split among people who share computers or have it set to automatically hibernate, those who forget, and roughly 15 percent who can’t be bothered because it takes too long. In this case, behavior across countries was pretty consistent.

The report also mentions a few case studies where businesses and government agencies have successfully targeted the corporate desktop in energy efficiency campaigns. It also lists a variety of incentive programs for energy efficiency run by the US and EU. This being the age of carbon consciousness, the report also notes that PCs and monitors annually account for the same amount of annual CO₂ emissions as 43 million cars. That language is used so often that it’s probably worth standardizing on a Megacar as a unit of energy use.

Overall, 1E will undoubtedly use this report as part of a marketing effort for its own management software, but the basic message applies to any effort to carefully manage energy use on the desktop. Because of the diffuse nature and lack of direct control over the hardware, it’s always going to be more challenging to exercise control over this hardware. But most organizations manage to do so, and there are substantial savings to be had if they extend that control to power use.