UK businesses wasting £300m powering idle PCs

Turning PCs off at night can make a big difference to carbon emissions

A new report published today claims that British businesses are wasting £300m a year powering idle computers.

However, the survey of more than 6,000 UK, German and US adults, most of whom use PCs to do their jobs, found that the UK actually emerged ahead in terms of environmentally friendly PC power management.

Some 78 per cent of UK workers use a PC to carry out their jobs, and the country has the largest proportion of workers (27 per cent) who cited environmental concerns in switching off PCs and/or monitors when away from their desks for long periods.

By contrast, 18 per cent of German respondents said that they turn off their PCs to cut electricity bills, and 21 per cent of US workers did so to comply with company policy and make sure their PCs worked properly.

Despite these good intentions, 63 per cent and 67 per cent respectively of UK and US employees believe that their employers should be doing more to reduce power consumption.

The report calculated that, if the 17 million workers in the UK who regularly use a computer turned it off at night, carbon emissions would be reduced by 1.3 million metric tonnes, or the equivalent of removing 243,440 cars from the road.

The annual PC Energy Report was sponsored by PC power management vendor 1E in partnership with the Alliance to Save Energy.

Sumir Karayi, 1E chief executive, said that awareness of the impact of idle PCs on the environment and IT budgets is growing, but that much more could be done.

"Around 50 per cent of the respondents questioned in 2007 powered down their PCs at work overnight, during the weekend and when away from their desks for long periods of time during the day, even it was just switching off their monitor," he said.

But this figure had only risen to 60 per cent in the latest report, which belied the fact that many solutions had been developed to manage PC power more efficiently and intelligently from a central point.