The Business Case for Power Management
The business case for activating system standby and/or hibernate settings is compelling. Benefits include:
- Cutting the electricity used by PCs roughly in half, saving $25–75 per PC annually. Estimate your savings using our online savings calculator (EXCEL, 65.54 KB).
- Reducing office cooling loads, saving an additional $5–10 per PC annually, and as much as $10–25 or more in warm climates
- Decreasing peak load demand charges levied by utilities
- Enhancing data security by reducing the chance that valuable information is displayed on unattended PCs
- Improving user productivity by eliminating the daily wait for computers to boot up
By contrast, the costs associated with activating these settings are minimal. Costs may include:
- IT staff time, as care must be taken to ensure that sleeping computers do not interfere with the distribution of administrative software updates. Additionally, older software applications and peripheral devices should be tested for “sleep” compatibility. Even for the largest companies, these precautions rarely take more than a few days of work — and EPA can save you time.
- Software solutions. There are lots of ways to activate sleep settings across entire networks of computers, including built-in (“native”) Microsoft management tools. Commercial software packages typically offer more feature-rich solutions and may deliver more energy savings, but they involve fees of roughly $3-15 per PC.
