Tag: Personal computer

Friday Green Numbers round-up 06/25/2010

Green numbers
Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

  • Australia is no stranger to tight water supplies, and fortunately that means smart water conservation strategies are being devised all the time. Australia is leading the way in everything from strategies to combat desertification to using renewable energy for desalination plants, and now it is putting that knowledge to work on six new infrastructure projects that can save 1.3 billion gallons of water.

    tags: greennumbers, australia, smart water, water conservation, desalination, renewable energy, desertification

  • GROWING numbers of girls are reaching puberty before the age of 10, raising fears of increased sexual activity among a new generation of children.

    Scientists believe the phenomenon could be linked to obesity or exposure to chemicals in the food chain, and is putting girls at greater long-term risk of breast cancer.

    A study has revealed that breast development in a sample of 1,000 girls started at an average age of 9 years and 10 months — an entire year earlier than when a similar cohort was examined in 1991.

    tags: greennumbers, girls, puberty, obesity, chemicals, food chain, breast cancer

  • There’s some interesting new data out on recent shifts in electricity demand and consumption, courtesy of the DOE/EIA.

    In 2008, total U.S. power generation was 4.1 million GWh. In 2009, that fell by 4 percent, to 3.9 million. That’s a 4 percent reduction — clearly the result of the economic slowdown. Nothing surprising there.

    What’s interesting, though, is how generation shifted by fuel type. Over the same year, coal-fired power generation fell by 11 percent, from almost 2 million GWh to just under 1.8 million.

    tags: greennumbers, fuel, type, coal-fired power generation, coal, DOE, EIA, U.S. power generation, electricity demand, electricity consumption

  • Just how important is turning off computers at the end of the day in an office building? Very, if a company wants to save big bucks on electricity bills. According to UC San Diego researchers, 50-80% of a modern building’s electricity use goes to IT equipment, particularly desktop computers. A report last year showed that not shutting down PCs equated to $2.8 billion in wasted electricity. Still, many offices don’t encourage their employees to hit shut-down on their PCs for a variety of reasons, including updating software while everyone is out or being able to keep the computer attached to the network so information on the machine can be accessed at any time. However, Microsoft’s new Sleep Proxy system claims it can help cut energy consumption by 60-80%, without getting in the way of office systems.

    tags: greennumbers, IT equipment, electricity use, Sleep Proxy

  • At a presentation at the Oxford Energy Futures conference on June 11th, Andy Duff, non-executive chair of RWE npower, made some controversial assertions about the future of electricity in the UK. He focused on three propositions.

    a)      The UK cannot meet its carbon targets without new nuclear

    b)      Electricity demand will grow at 1% less than GDP growth

NightWatchman saving energy

Night Watchman
Following on from my earlier post about the importance of turning things off, we had a briefing the other day from a company called 1E.

1E entered the power management space about 10 years ago when they wrote NightWatchman. NightWatchman is a PC power management application which aims to reduce the energy wasted by computers not being turned off at the end of the working day.

They were well ahead of the market (remember, they started 10 years ago, long before there was any power management built into the operating system) and, in fact, they had a hard time selling NightWatchman until about three years ago.

NightWatchman is now deployed on 4 million PCs worldwide savingcustomers US $360 million in energy costs and preventing 3 million tons of CO2 emissions, according to 1E.

As an interesting aside, the name NightWatchman came from the fact that the software was originally written for a company who had a security guard going around at night turning off computers and monitors! In fact, in the first seven years it was sold as a security and patching tool (it would allow companies to shut off computers in the evening and schedule a window in the middle of the night during which the computers would power up to download any security updates and patches which had been released).

In their whitepaper, entitled ‘Why Power Schemes are not Enough?’ [PDF] 1E make a great point –

It is impossible to monitor and report on the energy used by your PC estate (and therefore the cost and CO2 emissions this causes) using only the built-in tools that come with Windows. Because of the lack of built-in monitoring of energy usage, organizations are unaware of the lack of effectiveness of Windows sleep timers.

Windows power schemes should therefore not be used as the mechanism for reliable overnight and weekend energy saving for PCs.

Dell rolled out NightWatchman and wrote a white paper on the experience [pdf] – from the case study:

1E NightWatchman software saves files and closes applications and shuts down or places into sleep mode computers in the Microsoft Windows environment while preventing data loss and application errors. It also allows computers to be turned off from a central location, at a specified time, while providing extensive reports for management.

NightWatchman works with SMSWakeUp, which repowers computers in synchronization with Microsoft SMS. Administrators can boot computers from a centralized command so they can deploy security patches or new applications during off-hours.

By deploying 1E’s NightWatchman and SMSWakeUp applications to its 50,000 client computers, Dell expects to realize up to a 40 percent reduction in computer-related energy costs, which could translate into US$1.8 million in savings annually.

AT&T also installed 1E and from the release on AT&T’s rollout [PDF] it said:

[AT&T] is launching the NightWatchman® PC power management solution from 1E on 310,000 desktop computers across its domestic operations to help improve energy efficiency. Powering down corporate PCs during non-work hours is expected to save AT&T more than 135 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year and eliminate 123,941 tons of carbon dioxide emissions — equivalent to the electricity required to power 14,892 homes.

1E also have a server version of their NightWatchman software – this program identifies under-utilised servers, allowing them to be either re-deployed or decommissioned – fewer servers means less energy consumed by server sprawl. NightWatchman Server also has an energy management component built-in which has the added benefit of reducing heat from servers and therefore the air conditioning load in data centers required to cool the servers.

All of this means less energy costs and fewer CO2 emissions for companies. Go 1E!

by-sa