Computer Energy Management

Fact: Penn has over 20,000 computer systems on campus.

If everyone at Penn put their monitors to sleep after 10 minutes, we could save roughly 4,000,000 kWh of electricity each year and $280,000 from avoided electricity costs. These savings result in a reduction of power plant emissions of 2,400 tons of CO2, 18 tons of SO2, 5.6 tons of NO2 and is the equivalent of planting 326,000 trees.

Enable power management settings on your monitor:

To manually enable the power management features of your monitor, choose your operating system from the following list:

Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000/XP

*Windows NT 4.0 Workstation operating system does not support monitor power management.

FAQ on Computer Energy Management Settings (courtesy of Energy Solution)

Question #1:
Is it hard to activate ENERGY STAR Power Management (PM)?

Answer:
PM is simple to activate through options on your desktop. It takes less than a minute. Many computers already have it enabled.

Question #2:
Don't computers lose their network connections when they go into sleep mode?

Answer:
Because the program only enables the computer monitor, network connections are not affected.

Question #3:
If I have a screen saver, am I using PM and saving energy?

Answer:
Screen savers do not save money on utility bills or use less energy. Your monitor is still fully active when a screen saver is in use.

Question #4:
If my computer has the ENERGY STAR label on it, isn't it using less energy?

Answer:
Unless your ENERGY STAR power management feature is enabled, you will not enjoy the full energy -and money- saving benefits of your ENERGY STAR product.

Computer monitor ENERGY STAR savings are Safe, Simple, and Worthwhile.

Safe:
because the computer itself is not asleep. Move the mouse or hit a key and the monitor will wake up. No "sleep" settings for the CPU are changed, so there is no need to worry about losing unsaved documents or network connections. Long computations don't stop when the monitor sleeps. Today's equipment is designed around ENERGY STAR features; sleeping does not shorten its life.

Simple:
because the ENERGY STAR settings automatically power down your monitor.

Worthwhile:
because each time a monitor goes to sleep, it saves energy. With all of California's computers set this way, we could save as much electric power as is produced by a medium-sized powerplant. We could also save 430 thousand tons of CO2 emissions per year!

ENERGY STAR Technical Issues

Although ENERGY STAR features today are usually trouble-free, there are a few problems. Past problems with CPU power management include some network cards and networking software causing network connections to drop, and some older software causing a machine to freeze while it is in low-power mode. These problems are not common, but when they arise they tend to generate considerable work for information technology(IT) staff. The memory of such trouble has caused some IT professionals to routinely disable ALL power management in order to prevent possible conflicts.

The best solution in cases with network conflicts is to enable sleep settings for the monitor, but not for the CPU. Our program will not re-enable CPU sleep settings that have been turned off. With most operating systems it is possible to separately invoke monitor power management.

Fortunately, industry experts believe the most current generation of power management features and technology will solve many of the technical challenges of the past, while providing dramatic improvements in energy efficiency and performance.