Power saving statistics
How much can YOU save by turning off those pc's?
10 March 2008, by Wouter Aukema.
Our DNA benchmark information revealed an interesting side effect, and we conclude the following:
"If a company policy is introduced (and enforced) to turn of computers after office hours, thousands of dollars will be saved"
Approximately one in twenty users do not switch of their computer when leaving the office. As such, they are unnecessarily consuming energy. Addressing those users, and convincing them to turn of their machine will save thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars!
We can illustrate with this example:
The customer has about 25,000 active users (Real undisclosed customer, slightly modified figures and data to guarantee anonymity). A quick analysis with DNA, shows how many hours per day they spend online, using Lotus Notes/Domino and reveals to a certain extent what type of user we're dealing with:
Blue users show themselves less than 2 hours per day. These are remote users (e.g. sales agents), that have local replicas on their pc.
Green users are normal office users, who come to office up to 10/11 hours per working day.
Users in the red area are people that leave their desktop switched on all day and night. (1,374 users for this customer)
Focussing on the red users, they left their pc's on more than 12 hours per day. This totals an unneccesary 71.280 hours per week. (some users worked part-time)
If each desktop consumes 300 watts of power, they are wasting 21.384 kilowatt per week. (heat and airco not included)
A graph of prices in each state of the USA would allow you to calculate pricely, but for convenience sake, let's assume 10 dollarcent per kilowatt.
This usage results in a cost and a potential saving on the energy bill of US$ 111,196.- per year.
P.S.
If we would ask all users to switch off their pc during their one hour lunch break, in this particular example, the customer would save even more !
25000 users did 109,083 manhours online. 109,083 X 1 hour X 300 watt X 10 cents per kilowatt hour X 50 weeks = US$ 163,625.-
Remark
Sure, you can tweak some parameters, and make it 250 Watt per hour, or a price of 8.30 per kWh.. The fact of the matter is: Address those users, and you can save thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars!