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Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Mar 26, 2009 03:44 AM
from the just-let-it-run dept.
from the just-let-it-run dept.
snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."
Related Stories
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Five PC Power Myths Debunked 551 comments
snydeq writes "Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year, according to Energy Star, savings that can add up quickly for large organizations. Yet most organizations remain behind the times on PC power management, in large part due to common misperceptions about PC power, writes InfoWorld's Ted Samson, who outlines five PC power myths debunked in a recent report from Forrester, ranging from the energy savings of screen savers, to the energy draw of powering up, to the difficulties of issuing patches to systems in lower-power states."
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Why IT Won't Power Down PCs 576 comments
snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."
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Magic smoke (Score:5, Funny)
Unused PCs computers that are powered on but not in use are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year
How exactly does that happen? What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?
I thought when CPUs emit smoke you have to buy a new one.
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
However, saying the plant is releasing more CO2 for these computers is generally not true.
Phil
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Informative)
28.8 billion kWh/year is more than enough to 'change the power plants operating conditions'. A 125 MWe unit (the output of one generator of a nearby power station) delivers about 1 billion kWh/y, so shutting down all PCs at night would make a significant dent in the base load.
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, you can shut down a PC at night, and get it running in the morning.
You can not, however, do the same thing with a power plant. It takes much longer to cycle up.
Anyhow, what we would need is a lot of high-efficiency photovoltaic panels, that would create the most power exactly when you have peak demand in the areas where solar is viable to begin with.
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
You are missing the point completely. The point is that if most businesses started switching off their computers at night, the power companies would most likely change their operating conditions.
It might make it less economically viable to maintain such a high base load during the night, meaning it becomes more profitable to shift some of the power production on the sources with a shorter power up/down cycle.
Educating companies about how much money they are wasting is likely to be far more effective than asking them to be green for the environment.
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Funny)
Is THAT what they're pushing as minimum spec for Windows now?
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:4, Insightful)
It's still wasting company money. Who cares about how much CO2 is put out when really all the company really cares about is how much money they're wasting? For that matter, if we turned our computers off at home, we'd save money on our own bills. I know my power bill would probably be $20-$30 less if I turned my computer off when it wasn't in use.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
PCs (or any other things) aren't connected to a specific power source. They're connected to a power grid.
(No whoosh for you.) So how is being connected to a CO2-emitting power source the computers' fault then?
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm you forgot that along with "scientific evidence", they also claim the consensus is in and the science is settled so if you question it, you either hate people or work for an oil company.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Informative)
That's 960 minutes per day x 230 work days = 220,800 minutes. Or 3,680 hours per desktop per year. That's not counting in the 48 hours every weekend (52) which equals an additional 2496 hours, plus however many holiday days at another 24 hours each. If there are seven for whatever business, that's another 168 hours. And if the worker takes off two weeks each year, that's an additional 336 hours.
Grand total is 6,680 hours of wasted run time as an estimate.
For the people who run the fancy screensavers, the power used is fairly large. A blank screen is the best. That lets the monitor go into low power.
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Environmentalism will get more traction if they are honest about their data. We as a general population are use to hearing the doom conditions, as people are trying to push their agenda. So they do their computer models and give the results of the 4th standard deviation of the results.
The more truth is the fact if we reduce our power consumptions for the long term then the power companies can lower their output, as there is less demand. However the fact that your PC is on last night doesn't mean you PC is the cause of so much Carbon in the air. As it would still be there if you turn it off.
Parent
Re:Magic smoke (Score:5, Insightful)
Higher load means more reactors may need to be built, it generates more radioactive waste, heats up more water, raises the risk of accident, etc.
And since you are using nuclear fuel that much faster, more has to be mined and refined which adds to CO2 loading, chemical and radioactive chemical waste streams.
In addition, since the country is on a grid and utilities can flow excess capability into neighboring regions, you reduce that excess capability and therefore increase the amount of CO2 that some coal or natural gas-fired plant generates.
There are consequences for everything.
And sure, your computer or two doesn't make much of a contribution, but the more people that feel like you and also waste power adds up. That is the attitude that got us where we are now.
Parent
obvious reaction (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obvious reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with loving your company. What people don't realize often is that wasting company resources affects those who work in it.
If the employees are wasting too much power, the money to pay for them won't be taken from shareholder dividends or executive incentives. It will come from salaries.
So, it's not about loving the company. Don't waste company resources because, in the end, it's YOU who pays the bill.
Besides, also think about the impact of waste on the environment.
Parent
Re:obvious reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:obvious reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
The story says $36 per desktop computer per year could be saved. Now that sound like a lot of money at a company with 500 desktops ($18,000). But that company will have at least 500 employees and probably more. At 10% more or 550 employees to work those 500 desktop computers, that brings the potential salary increases to about $32 a year. If the average person works 38 hours a week and 48 weeks a year (1842 hours), that's about a penny or less per hour raise.
But it gets even worse. The heat cycles of computers heating up when in use and cooling down when powered off will take a small toll on the life of the computer. So I guess the real question might be is if the computer lasts 2 years instead of 3 or 4 or even 5 years, how many of those would need to be replaced because the Co2 emitted from making the things from scratch outweighed the entire carbon savings from the $36 worth of electricity not in use assuming that the power for those computers don't already come from a Co2-less generating facility. My guess is that an early replacement on any of them will offset any environmental savings which sort of makes this idea more hand waving then anything.
Parent
Heat Cycle Bullshit... (Score:4, Informative)
I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.
Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.
Parent
Familiarity Breeds Contempt (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the fundamental problem is that in the West, energy (specifically watts-hours of electricity in this case) have been so cheap in the last few decades as to be effectively free. This is changing now through worldwide recession and the depletion of the easy-to-get fossil fuel. Once electricity prices start seriously ramping up (which they inevitably will), companies will be giving their utility bills a lot more scrutiny.
Productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
I could lose $36 worth of productivity in a few days. My desktop and servers stay ON.
Re:Productivity (Score:5, Interesting)
Never heard of suspend? Hybernate?
Parent
Re:Compulsory miss (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Productivity (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a balance between leaving it on 100% of the time and switching everything on and off every time you walk from your desk to the coffee machine and back.
Parent
Re:Productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Turning PCs into a grid (Score:5, Interesting)
Scientists and students alike are allowed to use it freely for their computations. There is a batch submission system, and a whole lot of numerical calculations run on these computers during night. There are a few caveats, though:
All in all, you get lots of CPU, but low reliability. Which is fine for many applications. Additionally, not only you prevent energy wastage, but you also use the hardware more efficiently (so that the brand new quad core of the dpts secretary actually gets used in a reasonable way). :-)
By the way -- our admins hate it, when Windows computers are being switched off. They run the updates at night, as during the day the users are likely to stop an update that takes to long. I was being bashed for switching off computers during night
j.
Re:Turning PCs into a grid (Score:5, Informative)
The computers are not being left *solely* for the purposes of the cluster. The policy of the university admins is to leave them overnight for updates, and anyway the users don't like to turn them off (so they don't have to wait for the computer to boot up in the morning). Therefore we are utilising what sits there idle anyway. Furthermore, anyway you don't take into account the overhead of buying a supercomputer / cluster with 1000+ nodes in the first place -- and we are utilising what has already been payed for (both in terms of money from the university and in terms of energy used / CO2 emission that took to produce the units). Finally, buying a supercomputer / cluster is, due to the necessary bureaucracy involved in expensive investments, a major pain in the ass and also a system-administrative effort.
Of course, this solution cannot replace a proper cluster -- I have already outlined why, and also I agree with you in puncto efficiency. But if you have a bunch of PCs sitting around idle at night, and need calculations -- this may be a cheap and quick solution.
j.
Parent
Re:Turning PCs into a grid (Score:4, Informative)
1. paragraph tags make posts as long as yours easier to read, for future note
2.Your essential point is it's more efficient to use one presumably NUMA supercomputer to complete a task, which may or may not be the case depending on the supercomputer and the task given, but the point is.. they don't have a supercomputer, and likely don't have the funding for one.
Using their spare pc's at night in a clustered environment would be one of the most cost-efficient things they could do in so far as hardware purchasing, considering they already need and have the pc's setup in the right configuration
we don't all have a 128-cpu onyx 3800 gargantuan tower sitting in our closets for this kind of computing, we do tend to have at least a few relatively fast desktops available which would otherwise be off or idling.
Parent
BUY software to shut down a PC?? (Score:3, Interesting)
The ROI article mentions a product which you BUY to shut down your PCs.
I have a free solution:
shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m
You can schedule that at your server to force all computers to shut down at a specified time.
Something along the lines of
for /f "skip=3 tokens=1 delims=\" %m in ('net view') do shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m %m
Now, you could be nice and change -t 0 to something like -t 45 and give any poor sucker at a terminal a chance to shutdown -a, or at least close programs. (There will be one error at the end for the success notice.)
I do not recommend using that on a network without some tweaking: it will also shut down servers which show up in net view. Just a basic idea, and I do use a modified version of it at a couple of sites.
Even a scheduled wol.exe could run to make sure computers are able to run updates overnight.
Or you could push out a group policy that forces suspend after an hour of inactivity, and sets Windows Update to wake the computer to run. No fuss, no muss.
Now, what did all that cost us?
Re:BUY software to shut down a PC?? (Score:4, Informative)
Not so good with Vista though, as the warning dialog appears in another desktop. Part of that secure desktop thingy for UAC prompts and the like. You get a program appear in the taskbar but unless you actually notice it and click on it you'll never know your PC is about to shut down.
Your basic point is correct though, but I think a lot of organisations prefer to buy stuff than have in-house staff capable of writing even simple scripts like this. Presumably it's for the same reason they'd rather pay some consulting company loads of money to build an SOE we could've done ourselves: if it's outsourced to a high-priced company, it must be better!
I didn't RTFA, but does the product they're suggesting produce pie charts? That's probably the answer.
Parent
Dumb Terminals (Score:5, Interesting)
Use dumb terminals, something like sunrays...
Configure them to shut off when idle instead of run a screensaver, when you power it back on it boots pretty much instantly and the user can re-enter their password (or reinsert their smartcard) and be back where they were, all the session state is stored on the server.
No need to keep machines on overnight for updates, because the terminals are dumb enough not to need updates...
Dumb terminals boot instantly, so no need to keep machines pre loaded to save booting time.
Put a power breaker by the door, last one out can turn the breaker off, first one in can turn it on (they used to do this in our computer labs at college)... There shouldn't need to be anything turned on in an office when there's no people there.
Re:Dumb Terminals (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad that it's so easy to come up with ways to save power, but so few places and people actually implement them. I even have a colleague who refuses to turn off his computer, because "a 100 W more or less doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things". He's right about that, of course, but what he and many others don't realize is that doing the little things can actually affect the grand scheme of things. I, for example, use less than half as much electricity as the average household around me, simply because I use energy-efficient products and turn off most things when I'm not using them. It's not a lot of trouble, but if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!
Parent
Vast underestimation (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't take into account the vast, vast amount of time, energy and resources wasted by people who don't know how to use the fucking things properly in the first place. Let's start there before we get to titivating with power-management.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to show people how to do the simplest things, to save them hours of wasted effort each week. This usually leads to me writing explicit instructions and disseminating to those concerned but, ultimately, people just don't care (and I have trained people for a living with notable success, so it's not a "techie-personality pissing people off" thing).
Power-management? How about education. If every office-worker were to spend one day a year going through their daily grind with someone sat beside them who knows how to use their PC's potential (and how to explain it), productivity would double. I'm not just slagging off my luddite colleagues here; I know there are things I could do better, and would genuinely welcome the attention of someone who could show me how.
Sorry to vent my frustrations here, but it's that or do it at work. To put it bluntly: nice study, but frankly you're just pissing in the ocean.
More co-operation from BIOS manufactures (Score:4, Interesting)
As a Linux user I am used to laptops and desktops never quite working because the BIOS power management only works with Windows.
There are two possible reasons for that. One is that the open source software hasn't been written yet to take advantage of published APIs or, another possibility is that the manufacture is hiding it's APIs to make it really difficult to use anything except Windows to manage the system power.
If it is the latter then in it seems to me highly irresponsible on the part of the hardware manufactures. How to save energy when their hardware is not being used is really not something to be hiding for any reason these days.
I realise I don't exactly represent a significant number of users here. I'm just thinking in terms of what I can do to save energy at my own desktop (apart from the obvious switching stuff off when not in use!) and what's in the way. And Windows-centric BIOS's seem to be the main culprit.
I wonder how many of these computers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Displayed at home regularly here (Score:3, Insightful)
When my wife bangs her mouse around at home complaining it takes so long for the "screensaver" to give back her desktop. Clearly, the place she works hasn't set any power saving on their machines or she would know what is going on. I believe with about 500 employees at their peak last year, maybe they could have fired a couple fewer on their recent rounds of layoffs if they had actually used power saving.
Power (Score:5, Interesting)
And any company THAT bothered by this would be using more power-efficient PC's anyway. Face it, 99% of staff using a computer as part of their daily work don't need a full desktop PC and certainly don't need dual-core systems with Gbs of RAM. So instead of faffing about trying to recoup some of the loss from buying that terrible hardware in the first place (monetary costs, environmental costs, maintenance costs, etc.) they would be much better off buying some low-power desktops (like the Atom's, Via's etc.) and thus not pumping most of their electricity into heat wastage, fans, office cooling, etc. when they could just have a small 60W or so (maximum) PC that does the same jobs.
Those who are committed to their existing hardware - well, they should have been specifying and testing WOL, ACPI sleep, etc. in the first place if they wanted to make sure it worked in their particular environment. Chances are those stuck on old machines will have more problems trying to get the PC to sleep and to wake on cue than they would have just to buy a new cheap desktop. My pet hate is machines that won't WOL without having first been turned on manually - a power cut overnight (when the machines aren't on) means that the PC's just sit there and ignore WOL packets. And that is on fairly recent hardware (2 years old?). I know it's "wake" on LAN, but a full boot and complete shutdown (not sleep mode) will let it respond to WOL packets forever until the power disappears again.
I would hazard a guess that the following ALL save more power than would be saved by shutting off PC's overnight for a lot less hassle and inconvenience:
- Cutting off background services in Windows.
- Replacing hardware with more modern equipment.
- Disabling, centralising and/or just changing vendor of the antivirus programs to use less CPU, disk-access, etc.
- Replacing 10% of computers with a low-power alternative (even a laptop!)
- Turning off WAP's and other unnecessary networking hardware overnight.
- Turning the room temperature up/down by half a degree permanently (depending on the outside environment)
- Installing doors that shut themselves to keep hot/cold air in.
- Opening a couple of blinds/curtains to let sunlight into some of the less-used but still heated areas (cold-countries only) or fitting blinds/curtains to reduce the heat taken in from outside (hot-countries only).
- Training users to use shortcut keys instead of clicking the mouse for everything.
- Or removing that poxy plasma TV in the company reception which is on permanent loop playing to nobody.
The thing is, we take power so much for granted that when we get told to "save" it, we worry over the little bits (energy-saving bulbs) and completely forget about the larger draws (heating / cooling). $36 / year / PC is nothing, no matter the scale of the company. Even a 100 PC office (which could theoretically save $3600 / year) will probably spend multiples of that on heating/cooling, bringing someone in to do the work, or make multiples of that amount by selling off some of their old IT kit, fitting those light fittings that only switch on if someone is actually in an office, etc.
Getting businesses to understand means providing a valid, comparable reason. That normally means *money*. But even the green-friendly companies will save much, much, much, much more money by just replacing el-cheapo PC World computer with a decent low-power one and then selling off the old kit. If you do it right, you would even MAKE money by doing this (I know it's about £200/unit for a decent mini-ITX machine, and you could easily get that for a recent second-hand machine of good spec).
It's a *waste* of time. The proportion of power you save does not justify the effort to do it, especially not when a tiny, unnoticeable adjustment to a thermostat saves ten times the amount of power, and the hassle associated with implementing power-friendly PC's does not justify the end. Put a sign up and send a memo round to staff to turn off their PC
The Math... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article said:
and
When I multiply $36 in savings per PC times the 108 Million PCs being described, I get a possible savings of $3.88B, or about $1B more than the original article reported. We "waste" $2.8B, but we can "save" $3.88B by turning off unused PCs and practicing power management? Are the savings or the waste over-estimated? One has to be wrong...
Install LinuxBIOS, too (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the reasons the machines don't get turned off is the expensive 5 minutes wasted by boot times. It's an irritating waste of precious time as you return from lunch or start work in the morning, it discourages turning off boxes at night, and it discourages turning off boxes during the day when unused.
Unfortunately, this is partly the fault of Microsoft (who enourage stupid, resource gobbling behavior at boot time like frequent resource scanning by update software and unnecessary disk indexing), and BIOS's that use ancient, proprietary, and frankly broken tools to scan for hardware that hasn't been used in 10 years. The OLPC very successfully uses a LinuxBIOS and booting procedure that cuts this lengthy pause to seconds: it should be on every server and most desktops in the country, but motherboard makers are very reluctant to support it for various reasons. As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to fear of intellectual property issues involving ancient BIOS utilities, and unwillingness to publish their own hardware knowledge associated with their own particular component selection.
I'd love to see ASUS use LinuxBIOS by default. I've actually been asked to do that for deployments: it wasn't mature enough to use yet at that time, but it seems much more stable now and of higher quality than the average new motherboard BIOS.
Productivity (Score:4, Funny)
Unused ? How dare you... (Score:5, Funny)
How dare you call these PCs unused... They're part of my botnet you insensitive clods !
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Something is wrong with your PC or its setup. There is no reason it should draw more than a small trickle when shut down. Mine measures 0 watts when shut down. Now it isn't actually zero, the PC does draw a tiny bit unless I throw the hard switch on the powersupply, but that means it is less than a watt. That's how it should work when actually shut down. There is only a tiny bit of power drawn for things like charging the battery and the ability to do wake-on-LAN and such. 19 watts sounds like you have it s
Re:Half an hour a year? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
s2disk hibernate + WoL or scheduled wake-up w/BIOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Ouch. Dude, if you need to lose 15 to 20 minutes (let alone 45) to restart your PC, something is terminally wrong with your setup. Vista on a 486?
Even in such pathological case, wouldn't suspend or hibernate be an option?
I always power down my (work or home) PC when I expect to not need it for a while. Initiating hibernation takes me 2 seconds, resuming 30 to 40s in the rare instances when the machine is not already up again by the time I get back to it, or if I need to VPN into it.
I'm using Linux (Ubuntu 8
Re:s2disk hibernate + WoL or scheduled wake-up w/B (Score:3, Interesting)
I can tell you from experience in a large security-conscious organization that such pathological setups are not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think. The combination of antivirus and extremely aggressive login scripts bring fairly modern hardware with XP Pro to its knees on startup.
When I or any of my coworkers have to cold boot, or often even just whenever we dock an already booted laptop, it means a minimum of 5-10 minutes enforced coffee break. If you're actually in a hurry to get something for some
Re:Half an hour a year? (Score:5, Funny)
what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?
Initializing DRM layers, generating transparent overlay effects, decreasing the spin speed of the hard drive and generating a nice Vista logo on the desktop.
Parent
Re:Half an hour a year? (Score:4, Funny)
Reticulating splines?
:)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Yikes... so I guess the issue here is an IT department gone crazy? Or, at the very least, a system implemented by IT staff who are either completely lacking the proper knowledge or lacking an idea of what it is like to use this system in the "real world". Either way, it doesn't sound like much fun to use...
And LDAP: it's a light directory system, useful for storing information about users. Passwords, names, contact info... stuff like that. Can't say what in particular your system is using it for, but it
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As annoying as all these useless background and systray apps are, isn't this as much the fault of lazy IT departments as it is the companies which produce these programs? And from all these comments, it would seem this is a problem with *many* IT departments.
Why do the IT people leave all of this stuff on? I have to assume if people complain about it so much that they can't take it off themselves otherwise they would have long ago. So why can't IT be bothered to properly configure the machines they maint
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And no, I can't just go get coffee while the machine boots itself. The applicat