Absentation is the fate of many corporate initiatives to encourage voluntary conservation at the desktop. PC energy conservation requires employee awareness, adequate tools, motivation to use them, and IT support. But most companies haven't gone as far as raising awareness, because management is not conscious of electricity consumption, particularly for their digital infrastructures.

How much power does it save to turn off unattended computers? PCs represent a large and growing chunk -- about $3 billion -- of US companies' power bills. Shutting down idle workstations would curtail that consumption by half, according to some estimates. The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance did a detailed analysis in 2003 and concluded that the average consumption could be shaved by about 25% through effective use of power management.

For a quick-and-dirty estimate of PC power consumption for your offices, multiply the number of desktop PCs by 600, the ballpark number of kilowatt hours consumed per year by PCs that have a modicum of power management in effect. For a thousand PCs, that equates to approximately $50,000 annually. If Windows power management is turned off, the bill is considerably higher. For a more detailed calculator, visit Cadmus (www.computerpowersaver.com/calculator.asp).

Network Power Management Tools

Your company's power bill is of little concern to the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA cares more about meeting its mandate to reduce pollution. A wasted kilowatt represents a puff of toxic smoke from a coal-fired power plant somewhere. (In the hydroelectric Northwest, they fret more about salmon than carbon.)

The EPA's freeware tools put monitors to sleep. EZSave is a clientless application that watches the network and adjusts each PC's built-in power settings. If you manage NT systems, you may be asking, "what built-in power settings?" For most other versions of Windows, EZSave is downloadable from the EPA's web site (www.energystar.gov/powermanagement). Microsoft Active Directory users can download a client-server GPO version.

Commercial solutions are available in English from companies in the US, UK and Australia. Verdiem (www.verdiem.com) is a Seattle company that makes Surveyor, a software tool for centralized configuration and monitoring of power management settings in networked PCs and monitors. Rather than adjusting the operating system's power profiles, Surveyor interacts with its own client software on each desktop.

The state of the art in this sector is driven primarily by the customer's demand for a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Workers don't want power management to intrude on their day, and IT doesn't want complaints to intrude on theirs. With Surveyor, a network administrator configures a number of group profiles and assigns each user to a group. Each profile includes a schedule of settings by time and day. The system enforces the settings remotely, on the schedule, with flexibility for the user. Monitoring and reporting tell management whether the initiative is working to save power.

Evaluating Effectiveness

Would network power management be beneficial for your business? A good way to find out is to install Verdiem's Surveyor demo without turning it on. Let the software monitor a group of typical users, while you set up some test profiles. Then use the "prediction" function to calculate the potential savings of each profile. Users will be unaware of the test (their power profiles will be untouched until you turn on the software) and you'll have a good idea of the effectiveness in your situation.

Once you decide to manage power profiles enterprise-wide, there will be an adjustment period while you establish a collection of profiles and respond to user feedback. Afterward, it should be relatively effortless, and your company will see the savings in the power bill. It's far better to put PCs to sleep than to kill power management.

Experiences

Are you using any best practices for network power management? Have you found useful tools for the job? Post a comment to this entry.