"Let's give those numbers some context..." - how about let's give those numbers a reality check - "Nearly half of all corporate computers in the United States don't get turned off at night,.."
Yet another case of unsubstantiated, citation-less numbers grabbed out of thin air to cause FUD.

Yes, wasted energy is a problem; yes corporate computers are left on; but the growing skepticism of the sites that cry the sky is falling, and use seeming vapor stats to back them up, is HURTING the actual cause - which seems to be lost in the background noise article like these have become.

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JMC: You must have missed the part when I mentioned the study, or the concept of extrapolation in statistics.

Most places I have worked (in the IT department) push out updates to the workstations at night. The larger the company, the more likely this is to be true. The cost in electricity to the company is often negligible to a company that is running 10,000 systems because the impact to productivity wouold be a higher cost if updates to security and/or application software upgrades took place during working hours. Now, there are ways arround this issue, including taking advantage of wake-on LAN settings, and then using a shutdown caommand once all updates are completed. Wake-on LAN can also be used before the start of the first shift to have a single server wake up systems before people get into the office to minimize the time it takes to get working. The problems with these solutions is often touching each system to make sure BIOS settings are configured correctly to allow it's use, and making sure the network design allows for the WOL broadcast to each subnet. My point in all of this is that every sollution also costs a company money, and if the cost (in terms of dollars, not environmental impact) is the same, they will follow the path of least resisteance, ie. less work.

I just simply turn off my PC everyday. It's not that hard, and it doesn't take long to load up.

Plus, I'm not wasting extra energy and paying higher electric bills. It's just that easy.

Good article. Another alternative is using sleep or hibernate mode, which you can set to occur at off-work hours. Here is some more info from a Microsoft webpage (http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/technology/hardware/do_you_need_to_turn_off_your_pc_at_night.mspx)

Some Myths:

• Turning your PC off uses more energy than leaving it on. Not true. The small surge of power you use when turning it on -- which varies per PC make and model -- is still much smaller than the amount you use in keeping it on for lengthy periods.

• Turning your PC on and off wears it out. A decade ago, there was something to this, but not today, say Hershberg and others. It used to be that PC hard disks did not automatically park their heads when shut off, and that frequent on/off cycling could damage the hard disks. Today's PCs are designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles before a failure, and that's a number you likely won't reach during the computer's five-to-seven-year life span.

• Screen savers save energy. Not true. Screen savers, at a minimum, can use 42 watts; those with 3D graphics can use as much as 114.5 watts, according to Don McCall, a Dell product marketing manager who does power measurement studies for the PC manufacturer. "It's absolutely wrong thinking that a screen saver will save energy," he says.

• Your computer uses zero energy when "off." That's true only if it is unplugged. Otherwise, the PC utilizes "flea power," or about 2.3 watts, to maintain local-area network connectivity, among other things, McCall says. In "hibernate" mode, your PC uses the same 2.3 watts; in "sleep" mode, your PC uses about 3.1 watts. Monitors do use zero energy when turned off.

one thing for screen savers is to simply change it to blank, that doesnt take any power

but yes make sure you turn it off!

Let's say that I earn $20 an hour. Let's also say that a cold boot and starting all the various programs that I need in the morning takes 15 minutes. And let's take that 10,000 pc company. The company is spending $165,000 in electricity. How much would it spend in lost productivity (we'll assume traditional 5 day work week and about 2 weeks vacation a year)?

$5/day * 5 days / week * 50 weeks/year = $1250 / person

10,000 people? $12,500,000 in lost productivity, or leave it on and lose only $165,000 in electricity?

It's a no-brainer, and that's a number way lower than the average wage for the IT department I'm in.

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JMC: You're a far more diligent worker than I, then. I don't just get down to work the minute I enter my cubicle--there's tea to make and drink, a potty break to take, a head to screw on straight. I would say it all takes me at least 15 mins to get settled. Woe is my employer.

For a mid-sized company with 10,000 PCs wastes more than $165,000 per year.

While that may be true, company with 10,000 employees likely makes somewhere on the order of 500million - 1 billion/year. So that represents less than what the company spends on toilet paper.

Lets say that the average employee makes ~$20/hr, and their productive time is worth $45-60/hr to the company. If the computer takes 1 minute to boot, and load programs at the beginning of each day.

10,000 minutes/day * 340 days/yr = 3.4 million => 56666hrs = $2.55 million in lost productivity. Now we are talking more serious money.

I am all for saving energy, however arguing money with a useless argument in most cases. Energy is still cheap enough for those that make the decisions.

Gas going from $3 - $4 a gallon is unfortunate, but the person buying a new $25-35,000 car can afford it, and may still get the SUV if the versatility is worth an extra $500/year in gas over the sedan. (Avg purchase price around $31,000)

It has to be a moral/priority decision rather than purely a financial one. We have to say, it is worth spending more to use less. That we won't support companies that do not adopt green policies. That the environment is a worthy cause.

I have two dedicated laptop computers i use.I run a mobile business out of my vehicle.The first is loaded with mapping software.About 80 % of the hard drive working with a Garmin Gps 18.The second is a more or less stock Toshiba laptop.It runs basic stuff.Email/quicken and documents.

My mapping-gps laptop toke forever to load up.I removed all unneeded programs.Slashing the startup time in half.Games are gone.As is quicken.And i tunes ETC...

The non mapping unit is so slow at load up.It is not even funny.For every one program visible.There are probably a dozen hidden slowing it down.

To the "Statistical" poster above. You neglect to realize that you can set your machine to power on automatically. Not to mention, you assume that the employee will not be productive while their system boots, which is not necessarily true. In most cases, the first thing people do in the morning is top off their coffee. So if people do need their system immediately when they get in, set it to start up 5 minutes before you arrive. My machine is waiting for me every say when I get in. No waiting involved. It is far more efficient then leaving it on all night.

I disabled my employees ability to turn off their pc's. I do push out updates and virus scans overnight. The comuputers are flogged during the day by engineers abusing the systems, so its impossible to do it anytime but night.

Please also understand that the security updates that Allen speaks about are also tied to government regulations (e.g. HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, FDIC, PCI, etc.). As Allen correctly stated many companies apply updates during off hours so they will not have an adverse impact on productivity.

I have assisted in managing as many as 23000 desktop systems. My biggest concern was not the electricity we spent. My concern is always the what ifs. Such as the missing computers from the VA or other large organizations that had 15000 plus PII (personally identifying information) records that contain social security numbers. Isn't 165k a worthy investment if it means protecting that data so the machine will not be easily compromised in a LAN based attack? I would say yes.

For now I will sit back and wait for the flaming to begin.

Cheers,
Kyle

This number would have to be pulled out of thin air, being that any reasonable study would ask things like "Do you know if your IT manager wants you to leave it on for system updates?" or "Do you know about any power modes that are set on the computer to standby if not used for a half hour?"

That's what our company does and I'm willing to bet there's allot out there. The computer if not bothered for over a half out goes into standby and I didn't even find this out till I took an hour lunch one day and found that's how every computer in our building is set.

I'll agree, it's a problem and more can be done but let's not outright lie about it. And it's not a money factor, if businesses cared about how much money it was costing them they would have already fixed it (like mine did).

Ok, I am all for conserving energy, but I fail to see how turning off a computer at night is going to save all that much energy, when there are SUV's that get about what 15 mpg? I mean, come on, we have advanced computer technology exponentially in the last 25 or so years, but we can't figure out how to make a car/SUV more efficient in the 100+ years that they have been around? If you want to save some energy, ride a bike, walk, carpool, or take public transportation.
RM

Great article, Great points, even with turning my computer off every night or every time i leave the house, I noticed the led light still on on the router and DSL box, that still takes up energy. So now i have the power strip handy and after turning computer, monitors and printers off, I turn the power strip off.

For those that don't care about your companies power bill, try it at home, i'm sure you care about your power bill.

g2bgreen.com

I'm a sysadmin & I have to fight constant battles to encourage my users to keep their computers on at night. I frequently do remote administration on PCs at night - at least once a week, and in my case the supposition that OS updates are applied overnight is true.

It may seem wasteful that those computers are on all night every night for those occasional updates, but if users are turning their systems off every night, it's easy for any given system to not be turned on again for several days. It was mentioned before that Wake-on-LAN is impractical because admins have to touch every system; I would add that it is much wasted time waiting for the OS to load on a system that I would rather spend sleeping and the company would rather not pay me for.

I do not like that my computers consume that energy night after night. My company is addressing the problem by instituting, in our next generation of PCs, an Intel technology called vPro. It lets us completely manage computers even when they are "turned off" by adding a smaller, discrete computer inside the main one. This will consume power, but much less so than a system on full power all night.

There is a urban legend around IT departments that the strain on PC parts from cycling power is more costly than the power consumed on 'hibernate'.

spewing carbon dioxide? How do computers do that? As far as I'm aware computers take the air around in and use that to cool the inner componentry, then the hot air is blown out, no CO2 emmissions.
As for power bills, if the system goes into standby and is fairly recent (say built for XP) it goes into a low power mode by default, and I'm pretty sure that IT people don't mess with that, the "wake on LAN" could be on but that doesn't keep the computer from going to standby.

Check this US Carbon Footprint Map out, has United States Interactive Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State energy consumptions, demographics and State energy offices.

Statistics can say anything says
"""It has to be a moral/priority decision rather than purely a financial one. We have to say, it is worth spending more to use less. That we won't support companies that do not adopt green policies. That the environment is a worthy cause."""

for most people, and certainly corporations, it's always an economic decision. People buy cheap because they want to keep as much money for themselves as possible. This is why Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Cosco are thriving. People don't care about local stores especially when the local store cost them 50% more for food or clothing that is indistinguishable from what they get at the big-box store. The same is true with energy. One of my interests is light pollution. People can save themselves a tremendous amount of energy if they turn off their outdoor lights. But they don't. Heck, sometimes I don't because I forget the light is on. when you look at the economics of replacing a high powered high glare light with a lower powered fully shielded fixture, the payback in energy savings is measured in years, almost decades. So, there's no reason to do so. one place where economics been successful in driving change is compact fluorescent light bulbs. Granted, the cheap Chinese junk lightbulbs don't last as long but they do save the consumer electricity even if the carbon footprint is probably significant because of the trans-oceanic voyage.

But coming back to the issue of computers, I have a couple of servers here running 24 x 7 and am trying to consolidate as much as possible through virtual machines. Like many geeks, my laptop stays on 24 x 7 because I usually have persistent connections to multiple machines and even though I built a tool for preserving those connections, it's not reliable and I need some programming talent to help me make it reliable. Additionally, and this is mostly in the Linux world, power management is atrocious. My virtual servers should run and low power mode until there is a demand and then only increase CPU resources as needed. It's possible today but no one has donated the programming talent to do so.

in the end, doing things right, remember, functionality trumps politics and politics trumps everything else.

Take care,
Country mouse.

May be if we stop reading all these posts and get our work done, we can save some energy by turning off the computer early. So let's stop reading any further.

What is the title & date of this report by Alliance to Save Energy? it doesn't seem to be on their website.

I don’t understand the comment from the example about 10,000 corporate computers that states “Giving those same computers a breather every night would have roughly the same effect as taking 2.58 million cars off the road” If the average car generates about 6.05 tons of carbon dioxide a year (EPA website) and the 10,000 computers in the sample produce 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide, then wouldn’t 2.58 million cars work out to be 113,026,792 computers?

Also, I live and work in Seattle, where we have hydroelectric power. No amount of computer usage can be so simply tied to carbon dioxide pollution.

In these comments I noticed a consistent concern about IT's ability to push out patches while PCs are off at night. As a representative of 1E, the company that commissioned this report with ASE, I’ve seen this concern before and wanted to make sure to address it:

Many of 1E's customers have purchased its solutions specifically for its patch management abilities. When NightWatchman (remote shut down) is used together with 1EWakeUp (remote wake up), patches can be quickly and securely sent to each computer in the organization. 1E WakeUp puts computers into a ready state resulting in a success rate of 100% for software updates and security patches.

Additional value from combining “wake up” with “shut-down” tools:
- PCs that are properly patched have a longer lifespan, reducing e-waste and saving money
- IT administrators can schedule a staggered "wake up," reducing the 9:00am strain on the power grid
- Users can arrive and be ready to work – no more 10 minutes of wasting time until your PC boots up