Turning off can be a business turn on   |  March 17, 2008  

Flip the power switch. Save money. Simple, right?

A large North American bank operates 40,000 PCs, and powering these during the workday costs the company a great deal of money. But that’s the price of success: the bank can’t operate without its computers so it pays for the electricity that keeps them humming. However, the bank is also paying to keep those same PCs up and running all night long when office workers are all at home. Why? Because the company’s tech staff needs to push software and security updates out to those machines, and for that the computers have to be on.

Then someone at the bank had a brilliant idea: install off-the-shelf software that would shut down each machine after it had completed its update. The software cost: less than $100,000 total. The projected savings: $900,000 in the first year, perhaps $990,000 the second and roughly the same for every year after. The software — which will pay for itself in a little more than a month — is making the bank’s investors and finance people happy, and more importantly it is drastically reducing the company’s carbon footprint. This is one example of why, when Minister of the Environment John Baird tells Canada that meeting our Kyoto goals will bankrupt the country, nothing could be further from the truth.

Energy gone while we sleep
A 2007 report estimates that 31.2 million office PCs are left on overnight in U.S. businesses, wasting some US$1.72 billion of electricity and pumping 14.4 million tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year. Turning these PCs off at night will reduce carbon emissions equal to taking 2.6 million cars off the road. And the report’s author states that is a conservative estimate. (Read more)

HSBC went carbon neutral in 2005, the first bank worldwide to do so. Recently I was chatting with a senior HSBC executive who said the bank realized it was paying for electricity three times: once to power PCs and servers, second to cool the buildings of the heat generated by the computers, and third by buying carbon offset credits to try to undo the damage of the first two steps. So the bank began an aggressive conservation program.

By placing a voluntary carbon tax on its operations the bank is focusing on energy efficiency in advance of mandatory carbon taxes being placed on businesses.

Change standards, save billions
Another simple power-saving idea is sitting within your PC right now: as Google pointed out in a recent report, the PC industry could save 40 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity over three years — or more than US$5 billion in power at current California electricity rates — at “virtually no cost” by simply updating the design of power supply units used in computers.

Urs Hoelzle and Bill Weihl of Google point out typical PC power supplies use 65 to 80 per cent more power than necessary because the power supply units (PSUs) provide multiple output voltages, even though modern computer components no longer require this. Multiple voltages are a legacy of computing requirements from 25 years ago. By moving to a super-efficient 12-volt standard, power supply makers would also cut their production costs, as mono-voltage PSUs are simpler and less expensive to manufacture.

The Google findings were presented in a white paper titled “High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers” at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2006.

Also, that 40 billion kWh savings figure is based on only updating PSUs in 100 million PCs. Given that estimates place the worldwide number of PCs at one billion by the end of 2008, simple solutions such as turning computers off at night and efficient PSUs will save billions of kilowatt hours of electricity, save billions of dollars, reduce billions of tons of carbon globally — and all at a profit. So what are we waiting for? Perhaps it is only when a carbon tax is imposed on businesses — either voluntarily as in the case of HSBC or nationally as the Conference Board of Canada recommended in a January report entitled Use Green Taxes and Market Instruments to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions — that we will really begin to appreciate that green saves money.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, published in 80 countries worldwide, and The Learning Paradox, nominated for the national business book award. E-mail him at jimh@jimharris.com