Have you noticed how your household energy bills have gone up lately? It has been hard to miss the headlines, or to ignore the increasing figure on your power company’s invoice.
But how many IT managers have subsequently wondered how those price rises affect their spending? Probably not many, and that is primarily because power costs are someone else’s budget.
This is a state of affairs we should do our best to change.
The launch of our Green Computing campaign this week is about more than just the worthwhile goal of making a contribution to reducing the threat of global warming and environmental damage.
It is all too easy for cynics to dismiss green initiatives as a worthy, touchy-feely, trendy response to climate change, even though environmental issues alone should be enough to make green computing part of every IT strategy.
But the real impact is financial. According to the Carbon Trust, the cost of running a PC left on all day will be about £37 a year. But if switched off at night and at weekends, this drops to nearer £10 a year and saves enough energy to make the equivalent of 34,900 cups of coffee. That is just one PC.
Office equipment is the fastest-growing area of energy use, accounting for up to 20 per cent of total output.
And that does not even take into account the increasing cost of air conditioning, as more and more powerful processors are squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.
If your company has a corporate social responsibility policy, then green computing should be central to that plan. But if you have a finance director keeping a close eye on budgets, and you need to free up funds for new projects, then green computing is simply common sense.
In a few years’ time, we will look back on campaigns such as this and wonder why we ever needed to make the case, because the principles will become run-of-the-mill. Green Computing is simply best practice computing.
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