| Eco-friendly power management |
|
Developing eco-friendly operating practices and infrastructure design has the potential to yield financial benefits while also being environmentally responsible. The Microsoft® Windows Vista® operating system is a great example of the growing awareness of environmental issues among corporations. Vista grants administrators centralized management of enterprise-wide power management settings via group policy, a function previously unavailable without third-party tools.
This means that for an organization that has 100 workstations using LCD monitors, this could result in financial savings of more than $5,000 and prevent the release of approximately 50 tons of green house gases on a yearly basis. Many organizations currently have no pressing business need to upgrade to Vista, yet may be inclined to take steps toward more environmentally friendly operations. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Windows® XP and 2000 operating systems’ power management settings cannot be configured by group policy by default due to limitations in the ADM language, which only permit manipulation of String and DWord values. Because power management settings are stored as binary data, there is no method to centrally manage these settings in those operating system versions. There are tools that can help, however. One of them is Energy Star’s freely available EZ GPO3 tool (open source, under a BSD-style license), which brings group-policy-based power management capabilities to Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP (and is also compatible with 2000 and 2003). _______________ 1 www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/VistaEnergyConserv.mspx |
The exact energy footprint of a typical workstation can vary significantly depending on the hardware and software configuration, though most would agree that there is typically a significant level of waste. To promote the potential environmental and fiscal benefits of Vista’s power management capabilities, Microsoft drafted a white paper1 resulting in figures that agree with calculations by other sources such as Energy Star.2 Realistic values were used for things such as idle hours, working day definitions, and configurations. Assuming a fairly average Intel® Pentium® 4 processor-based configuration with either a 17-inch CRT or LCD, the paper estimates savings to be $70.77 or $55.63 per workstation per year respectively, based on the July 2006 year-to-date average price per kWh of $0.0931 for the commercial sector. Based on EPA figures, this energy generation results in more than half a ton of green house gas being released into the atmosphere annually.
