How green is your business?

With wildly fluctuating energy prices, not to mention concerns over landfill, carbon emissions and global warming, it pays – literally – to be as green as possible these days.

And not just at home – businesses need to play their part, too. So in this month’s business section we look at what you can do to enhance the green credentials of your company.

There are two main drivers here. One is altruistic, whereby you want to reduce the impact that your business has on the environment, while the other is purely financial, with big savings to be had, especially when it comes to energy consumption.

Taking charge of power
Walk past most offices when most workers have left for the evening or at weekends and you’ll see and hear PCs, printers and other office devices all humming away, doing nothing more than consuming power and generating heat.

Estimates of the amount of energy wasted vary wildly, but according to a 2006 report from the National Energy Foundation, UK businesses could be using up to 1.5 billion kWh of energy per year more than they need to. In monetary terms, that’s about £115m or, in carbon emissions, the equivalent of running a typical gas-fired power station for a year – and all because users can’t be bothered to switch off their PCs.

But, short of throwing the mains switch every evening, how can you minimise the amount of power used by your business?

Unfortunately there are no easy answers and the first thing to understand is that, no matter what they might say, most people will simply ignore any instructions you give them to switch off equipment. A few will fall into line but for the majority of workers you’ll need to do the thinking for them and configure their systems to be as energy efficient as possible.

That means, for example, making sure that every piece of office IT equipment you buy is Energy Star rated, especially the big consumers of electricity, such as monitors. You should also make sure that any energy-saving features are activated as, surprisingly, this often isn’t the case.

Power-saving steps
Windows has lots of power-saving options, but you should choose them carefully. For example, you’ll make far bigger savings if you opt to automatically switch monitors into standby mode rather than just running a screensaver when there’s no activity. Remember, however, that unless it’s physically turned off a monitor, or any other device left in standby mode, will still consume some power.

Another, often overlooked, option is hibernation. Here the status of the PC, its memory and video contents are saved to disk when the PC is switched off. When it’s turned on again those settings are automatically restored and you can carry on exactly where you left off.

It’s not quite as convenient as sitting down at a PC that’s been left on, but is much quicker than booting from scratch. Moreover, virtually all modern PCs and laptops now support this option, along with the ability to enforce hibernation whenever the on/off button is pressed.

Enforcement is the biggest issue. In a small company you can simply go round to each PC making sure it’s set up to save power the way you want. However, in larger organisations you’ll need to look at managing power settings centrally.

Unfortunately, Windows group policy can’t be used (because of the way the power settings are stored), but there are lots of tools available to help. For example, Nightwatchman from 1E Software loads a small power management agent onto every PC and server you want to manage. This can then be instructed to power down PCs when out of hours and, just as importantly, power them back up again to enable software updates and other changes to be made.

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