A report released by 1E, an IT energy consultant, says half of US workers don’t power down their PC’s at night resulting in energy wastes upwards of $2.8 billion US Dollars. The figures are equally disturbing in some of the other countries polled with wastes in Germany alone at over one-billion Dollars.
It would seem that many people don’t want to wait the three minutes in the morning it takes for their PC to start up. Or maybe some still think it’s bad for the computer or somehow energy inefficient to power down at night. While that may have been true in the early era of personal computing, it hasn’t been the case for the last fifteen years.
If you personally turn off your computer when you leave the office but are concerned about your coworkers habits, you should try to petition your company to install some type of energy reduction software on the computer network.
But before we get ahead of ourselves here, while it seems like a win-win to just turn off the computers at night therefore saving money and reducing carbon emissions, that would clearly be a shortsighted solution as it fails to take into account the three minutes of the American worker’s time which, unlike our environment, can’t be replaced.
Oh and if for some reason you need to leave your computer on at night, at least save some lives man: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/idle-computer-save-lives.html?campaign=daylife-article
