Saving
energy costs & reducing carbon footprint
The Government is so geared up to reducing our carbon emissions
by at least 26% by 2020, that they are very sure to start introducing
legislation that encourages businesses to be more efficient, especially
regarding the massive footprint produced in manufacturing and
running IT equipment.
Electricity
is a major contributor to carbon emissions and this is an area
where you can easily help to reduce your company’s costs
whilst also reducing your carbon emissions.
Energy efficiency
can be found in both hardware and software solutions, but to be
at your most efficient you should seriously be planning to implement
both within your organisation. Let’s look at some of the
ways you can save money.
Software
A very simple way of reducing your electricity costs for desktops
and laptops that you already own, you can simply upgrade from
windows XP to Windows Vista. For example, an organisation that
has approx 200 desktops could save an estimated £26 per
PC, per year in electricity costs. That’s around £5,200
per year in total. If you are a typical secondary school and have
approx 500 desktops installed, then you could be saving up to
£13,000 per year in electricity costs. That’s money
that could be better used to deploy new technologies, or develop
existing programs within the school.
Desktops
Using the HP DC7600 desktop as an example, if you have 400 of
these installed with the 17” LCD. The electricity costs
on this unit would be approximately £55 per unit, per year,
if left powered for 8 hours per day. Now if you compare that to
the new HP DC7900 with a 17” LCD, the electricity costs
would be £37 per unit per year, that’s a massive saving
of around 33%, which could save you £7,200 per year, and
reduce your carbon footprint by 41 tonnes.
Monitors
Most of us are guilty of taking a computer’s monitor for
granted, it just sits there displaying an image but not really
doing much else. Very few of us are probably aware of the amount
of electricity the monitors alone use. For example a 17”
CRT monitor that is constantly switched on for 8 hours per day
which is the case in most businesses or schools, would cost approx
£1,000 per year to run. Compare that with a 17” LCD
flat panel, which would cost approx £600 per year, whereas
using an energy efficient 17” LCD would only cost £340
over the same period. So if you have more than 100 CRT’s
in your organisation then you could be saving a considerable amount
of money and reduce your carbon footprint by approx 14 tonnes
at the same time, in just one year alone.
For those
organisations that are currently in the phase of planning to replace
your desktops or laptops then we advise you to look at the power
consumption of any prospective equipment, as paying a little more
for the initial hardware may save you far more money in the first
year alone in electricity costs.
If
you would like to know how much your organisations could be saving
each year then please contact us on 0845 539 0048 or enquiries@tech-x.co.uk
and we would be happy to put together a cost analysis chart for
you free-of-charge.
