Employees who leave their PCs on overnight each cost their companies £70 a year, according to a report produced by the National Energy Foundation.
The report found that 18 percent of UK-based office workers never turned off their PC when they went home and a further 13 percent frequently left their PCs on.
The result of this neglect is spiralling electricity use for the business concerned and additional carbon dioxide emissions across the UK equivalent to the output of 120,000 4x4 cars.
The report found that workers did not turn off their PCs for five main reasons:
- They couldn't be bothered (17.5 percent)
- No-one else in their office did (10 percent)
- Because it's unimportant (10 percent)
- They forget (8 percent)
- They are afraid of losing their work (1.8 percent)
"This is a problem for two reasons," said Gareth Ellis, a spokesperson for the National Energy Foundation. "Energy prices have doubled in the last 24 months, and companies' expenditure on electricity is obviously directly affecting their profits."
Ellis added that leaving PCs on overnight was also causing environmental harm. He said, "Electricity is the dirtiest fuel we use and there is an awful lot of carbon dioxide generated, which is the main greenhouse gas. That gives us problems with climate change."
The UK Government has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent by the middle of the century.
Ellis suggested that business managers should insist their staff shut down their PCs when they are not being used. He added that IT managers might consider deploying software that automatically shuts down unused PCs — or sends them into hibernation.
According to analyst group Gartner, companies' electricity usage is set to rocket further, particularly because of energy-sapping high performance datacentres.
Gartner vice president Rakesh Kumar predicted last week that firms who do not control their energy usage could end up spending half of their IT budget on energy.
UK businesses waste £115m each year by leaving unattended PCs switched on, the National Energy Foundation reported.
A business with 20,000 employees typically has around 2,500 PCs left on in any one evening, translating into extra electricity usage costing £175,000 per year.
Computers left on in standby mode save little energy, with a power usage of 70 percent of their maximum, PC supplier Fujitsu Siemens estimates.
Software supplier 1E has created an online tool and game to calculate business electricity usage.
Talkback
Incredibly biased article.
Many PC's are left on overnight due to company policy. There are a variety of infrastructure tasks being run after hours that need PC's to remain on, such as virus scans, patch delpoyment, application deployment, policy checking, standard build checks, and so on.
Add to this, there may be grid computing methodologies employed, the list goes on.
The least you could have done was to balance such a one sided article with some aspects of what actually happens in the real world.
Very unimpressed with the "reporting" here.
One answer would be to remove all computers and return to pen and paper...
Or people could at least remember to turn the monitors off when they leave.
it takes me 15 minutes to be up and running. so i lose 75 mins a week and around 4000 mins a year. put that in company context and see the money saved....this report is biased, one sided and politics based
Create a .bat file and put Shutdown.exe -f -s in it. Add a scheduled event to call this bat file at 5.30pm and voila - your PC will always turn off at 5:30pm. This is for XP.
A bit one-sided, but a very fair point.
Many companies require their PC's to be left on overnight for the resons mentioned by Roberto Miaetta in his comments.
It would make sense to have at least ALL monitors switched off overnight!
So whats the answer? User Eduation and Company Policy Enforcement? Perhaps.
Employees do not have a choice when it comes to the hardware they use at work. Hardware is available that uses a fraction of the power consumption of the average PC: see for example the products of VIA.
Surely some more research would have made this obvious:
It does not appear that the author is in position to call other
people lazy.
It is my companys policy (BAE Systems) that all PC's are left on over night. This is to ensure that our IT support can provide updates during the night. Daft or what ?
Our hardware failure rate has reduced substantially since we stopped turning our computers off at night during the week. This is undoubtably less than the electricity cost.
I also detect a cost saving in reduced room heating bills.
My onsite computers are now powered via a pwer dis block which works so that when the PC is put to hibernate ALL ancillary units and the PCs are turned off. When the PC power on button is pressed it comes on v rapidly at the point it was turned off. The power saving is there and startup time absolutely minimum. If you forget to set hibernate at days end the power management puts them to hibernate after about 30 minutes but that is adjustable. The blocks came from Powergen-I have not seen them on general sale.
Thanks for your comments - it's always good to get a few extra viewpoints - all valid points - particularly with regards to the reasons why PCs should be left on. There is still a case that some employees do not turn off their PCs when they should. Whose fault that is, is open to debate. Unfortunately in a real-time news environment it's not always possible to get half a dozen views ahead of writing and it is certainly no intention of the newsdesk to be biased. In fact we pride ourselves on putting forward a variety of views. Which is why these talkbacks make interesting and valued reading. Keep it up.
Richard, your defense ( a busy environment ), is appalling.
I work with people who are under stringent deadlines every day, but if one of my staff provided work of the calibre you have, they would be looking for a new job.
The comments that you have received in this thread were not thought of extensively, they did not require copious research.
They were simply comments that ANYONE could have arrived at, had they simply engaged their brain.
You sir, are a waste of bandwidth, and I look forward to reading articles from journalists that actually WORK for their paycheck, instead of handing in half baked drivel such as this.
This is such a timely topic—and one that I about each day. As the head of Strategic Sustainability Consulting, I spend my days working with clients who need to be smart about their sustainability. While we all understand the need to mitigate our organization's environmental impact, we absolutely must ensure that we go about it in a strategic way. There might be good reasons for keeping computers on at night, and others that are not good at all--the key is finding a balance that suits both parties.
Some readers may be interested in our upcoming webinar, "Greening Your IT", on April 19. Our guest host, Michelle Bishop of Bishop Communications, will take participants through a step by step plan for minimizing the environmental impact of their information technology systems. Participants walk away with a sense of where IT professionals can influence the system, and where larger buy-in is needed—and where behavioral change needs fits into the initiative.
In our first offering of this webinar on March 15, 100% of participants ranked it as "good" or "excellent", and 100% said they would "definitely" recommend it to others. You can read a longer description of event, and register at our website: www.sustainabilityconsulting.com (click events).