Green IT in the office

Even without implementing the newest technology, significant energy savings can be realized by sensitizing employees to change their habit. Company policies will help making employees aware of how they can contribute to save energy. Examples are: using of hibernation mode and changing power-management settings of the hardware, duplex printing and generally avoiding unnecessary printouts to save paper and energy.

Each office PC offers opportunities to save energy, by using hibernation mode and changing power-management settings. The latest generation of energy-efficient office PCs can reduce energy costs by more than 60 %, because of their better power units, storage technology and processors. Latest LCD screens and thin-client architecture offers further huge opportunities for saving energy and energy costs.

The Germany based “Fraunhofer Institut” found out that replacing a conventionally PC with a thin client reduces the carbon emissions of the system by over 54 %. Moreover thin clients provide further benefits. Since they are much lighter, more compact and consist of fewer components, they are producing fewer costs for transportation and disposal, and less consumption of material.

Here is a sample calculation: a company with 300 workstations that equips 75 % of them with thin clients can prevent the emission of about 148 metric tons of carbon emissions over the course of five years. By comparison: this is the amount of carbon emissions that a Volkswagen Golf would emit if it travelled a distance of 1,093,000 kilometres – 27 times the circumference of the earth...