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Idle computers waste £300 million a year

Some £300 million a year is wasted from powering idle computers across the UK each year, a report has claimed.

By Jennifer Scott, 26 Mar 2009 at 11:24

UK businesses are wasting £300 million a year powering idle computers, according to a report released today.

Even with the huge utility bill, the UK was shown to be the leader of the field in environmentally friendly PC power, according to the annual PC energy report, commissioned by PC power management software specialist 1E and published by the Alliance to Save Energy.

The report showed that of the UK’s 78 per cent of workers who use a PC, 27 per cent said that environmental concerns were a factor in turning off their PCs or monitors when away from their desks for a significant time.

While 27 per cent may not sound much, only 17 per cent of US people surveyed said they had environmental concerns about powering down - with just 10 per cent in Germany citing green reasons.

In a separate survey conducted in 2008, just 50 per cent of workers in the US shut down their PCs. In Europe, that figure was slightly higher at 54 per cent. However, they are much better at saving energy at home with 78 per cent Britons and 63 per cent of Germans thinking green at home.

That said, 63 per cent UK employees and 67 per cent of US employees do however believe that their employers should be doing more to reduce power consumption.

Sumir Karayi, chief executive of 1E, said: “Employers today have a golden opportunity to demonstrate environmental and financially astute thought leadership by taking a few simple energy-saving measures, such as setting up processes to power down PCs.”

“Everyday that passes is a lost opportunity to save money and reduce your carbon footprint.”

Click here to read our top ten green tips for IT.

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2 comments

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Boot Time

If we ignore the legitimate environmental point for a second, and just focus on the financial argument, I read elsewhere that the estimated cost / potential saving is £17 per year, per computer.

Average hourly pay in 2006 was £12.50 an hour - and that is pay, not cost to the firm. Even sticking with pay, that means the annual saving per machine is about the same as 90 minutes work.

If most people work about 230 days a year, then you can do some simple maths - if it takes any longer than 23 seconds to start up and shut down the machine, this is not a financially astute move at all.

If you want to be ecologically friendly, and business astute, it's probably better to look at laptops that support 'deep' sleep aka S3 - but these, like most greener options - are typically more expensive than the budget end machines businesses use. Again, the savings may not justify the costs.

By JulesLt on Friday Mar 27

Wear and tear

I agree with JulesT - it's an overly simplistic way to state the costs.

Warm up and cool down of equipment is heavy on wear and tear and will cause a failure earlier in component life. One engineer travelling to a fix costs more money/CO2 than a year's power consumption.

The only way to calculate the cost of ownership effectively is to do a detailed energy and environmental audit and then you might get near an answer.

Best way to save energy is to make it expensive through tax. Government can always give it back in some other form so the impavt on balance sheets could be zero. Better still is to do stuff like zero rating video conferencing kit and ditching company cars altogether. How many people drive somewhere to make sure they do the business mileage to keep their tax liability down and skive off? THOUSANDS!

This kind of "Shock Horror" headline figure confuses people and gives them an excuse to waste energy in other aspects of their lives.

It's misleading and doesn't help the cause of lower energy consumption.

By maxblink on Friday Mar 27