powering down

The 2009 PC Energy report is out and the findings are quite interesting.

About half of the 108 million office computers in the United States are not properly shut down each night. U.S. companies are spending about $2.8 billion each year simply by leaving computers on overnight. And, if the world’s 1 billion PCs were powered down for just one night, it would save enough energy to light the Empire State Building – inside and out – for more than 30 years.

I do have to say, I work in an office where the computers are left on overnight. We run nightly backups of all our data, and I'm not in a position to go against that. But I have set my work computer's energy settings to be as efficient as possible. I believe the CPU powers down around midnight, well after the backups are complete. And I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only ones to even give it a second thought. As the USA Today article says, many employees don't care about the energy expenditures because they don't feel responsible. (Which is true for more than just energy saving, but that's for another rant.)

Saving energy and money is as simple as powering down when you don't need it on. Your email doesn't need to be automatically checked every three minutes in the middle of the night if you're not going to check it until morning anyway.