Article by Simon Williams

Article by Simon Williams It’s not often that doing something for the good of your business is directly in line with doing something positive for the environment, but cutting energy use fits both bills. If you can reduce the amount of energy expended in your business, costs will drop in direct proportion. There are plenty of ways to reduce energy use, of course, but here we’re particularly concerned with energy used in IT. This is a significant section of business energy use. According to government statistics, the UK service sector used around 18 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) energy in 2007, of which 15 per cent (around 1.2Mtoe) was for computing and cooling alone. Cutting back on these two energy uses - the computers themselves and the energy used to cool them - makes a direct impact on company costs. Cutting back on energy use by making things more efficient can bring secondary savings too, which may not be immediately obvious. If you can increase the energy efficiency of front and back-office computing, you may not need to increase hardware resources as quickly as you thought, which can save capital expenditure on the kit, cooling equipment and even the buildings necessary to house them. There are plenty of ways of achieving these savings, but starting in the front office, economies can often be made by careful choice of hardware and how it’s set up.
Office savings
Energy saving is not only about improving efficiencies in huge data centres, although they do account for a high proportion of overall energy use in larger companies. There are also economies to be made in any office where computers and printers are in regular use. Windows 7 can be a lot more energy-efficient than Windows XP and even Vista. Although it may need a more powerful PC to run than XP, in tests they both take about the same amount of power doing typical office work such as word processing. However, it’s when the machine’s not in use (which is most of the time for a typical