King County Cuts Energy Costs With PC Mgmt Software

May 28, 2009

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King County in Washington says its agencies have reduced energy consumption by an average of 38 percent by using PC power management software.

“Networked PCs definitely consume the majority of our office energy requirements,” said King County’s Central Information Technology Enterprise Services Manager Bob Neddo. “By implementing simple policies –- such as turning off our monitors after 15 minutes of inactivity, and suspend PCs after one hour — we were able to generate a surprising amount of savings.”

King County is using Surveyor software from Verdiem on nearly 10,000 PCs in 18 departments, ranging from the Metropolitan King County Council to the Department of Transportation. Each of the 18 agencies in King County can set their own PC power management policies. The Department of Community and Human Services has seen an energy cost savings of 62%, equal to about $14o,000 in savings.

Surveyor is priced at $15 to $20 per PC, according to InformationWeek reporting, and an save $20 to $60 per year in energy costs.

Some utilities will offer reimbursements on Surveyor software purchases, as Pacific Gas & Electric and Puget Sound Energy have done in the past.

Seven percent of IT professionals that responded to a recent Forrester survey said they are already are using software to enable PC power management policies; 20 percent said they are evaluating products, and thirty-seven percent said they have no interest currently, but would consider it.

In addition,

- 28% of respondents said their top plan was asking employees to turn their computers down or off when they’re not being used.

- 24% said they preactivated power management settings on their systems.

- 13% of respondents said they had a widely scaled PC power management plan in place.

- 30% either had one in place that needed to scale or had a pilot program under way.

- 50% said they had no plan in place, but were considering it.

Verdiem recently said it would release a version of Surveyor later this year that will reduce the amount of power going to IP phones, said CEO Jeremy Jaech in an interview, while in San Francisco to speak at this week’s Cleantech Forum, according to Greentech Media.

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