Tuesday, March 5, 2002

Colleges Hope to Save on Electric Bills by Letting Computer Monitors Sleep By FLORENCE OLSEN Several colleges say they expect to realize significant energy-cost savings -- at the expense of minor inconvenience to computer users -- simply by enabling the power-saving "sleep" feature on computer monitors. Mills College, in Oakland, Calif., expects to save $10,000 this year by cutting the amount of energy that its monitors use. Every dollar saved makes a difference for the college, which faced a $750,000 spike in energy costs at the height of the California electricity crisis last year. Seeking energy savings wherever they can be found, the California State University System, too, is encouraging use of the energy-saving feature on computer monitors as part of a systemwide plan to reduce its energy consumption by 15 percent in five years. The feature lets a computer's monitor go dark if no one has touched its keyboard or mouse for, say, the past 10 minutes. Even well-heeled Harvard University says it hopes to realize at least $15,000 a year in energy savings on 1,000 computer monitors used by students and faculty and staff members in the Kennedy School of Government. Some colleges that have chosen to participate in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "Sleep Is Good" energy-saving campaign have put the software on their Web sites so that students can click on a screen to have it change the power settings on their personal PC's. Until recently, power management -- the formal name for energy-saving efforts -- had a "bad name" among people who manage information technology, says Steven Ryan, a program manager for the EPA's power-management program, which it calls Energy Star. Computing officials experienced numerous problems a few years ago, he says, when experiments with power management on computer processors caused frequent disruptions. Computers were disconnected from the network or had to be rebooted often, people complained, and information-technology managers gave up trying to make power management work. "IT folks are held accountable for a smooth-running operation," says Mr. Ryan. "No one's holding them accountable for the energy [used]." The EPA's current focus on energy savings from monitors avoids the crash problem, which affected only processors, Mr. Ryan says. The agency estimates that, among all monitors currently in use, about half have the energy-saving feature disabled. The number is high for an industry in which most manufacturers are shipping monitors that are built to meet the EPA's Energy Star energy-saving specifications. Power-management features on computer monitors create no known problems, Mr. Ryan says. Colleges that ignore the energy consumed by computer monitors are overlooking a significant source of savings: Between 60 and 70 percent of the energy that a computer requires is used by the monitor, Mr. Ryan says. The EPA uses a few simple assumptions to calculate how much energy can be saved by setting monitors to go into sleep mode after 10 minutes if no one has touched the keyboard or mouse during that time. If a college has 1,000 computers but only 50 percent of them have power management enabled, the college can save 200,000 kilowatt-hours a year by enabling power management on the other 50 percent. In that case, Mr. Ryan says, an institution paying 10 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity could save $20,000 a year. To help colleges audit their computer monitors' energy savings, the EPA provides free software. It is available in a network version and a desktop version, for Windows PC's only. The Kennedy School of Government used the network version to configure the energy-saving settings on 1,000 monitors. "When users log in, it automatically adjusts their monitor settings," says Michael J. Garofano, director of information technology at the Kennedy School. No software has to be installed on users' desktop machines, which was not always the case with power-management solutions that were offered a few years ago, he says. As a monitor goes into sleep mode, the screen goes dark. When someone touches the computer keyboard, the monitor takes 5 to 15 seconds to "wake up," depending on how old the monitor is, Mr. Ryan says. "If it's a really old monitor, it might take a little longer." One of few drawbacks to the software, according to Mr. Ryan, is that it doesn't work on PC's running the Windows NT 4 operating system. But it works on all other Windows systems, he says. Another drawback is that some people simply like to work without having their screen go into sleep mode. "There are people who find it a nuisance," he says. But not so at Mills College, says Renee Jadushlever, assistant vice president for library and technology. Eight-five percent of the 700 monitors on the campus are now enabled to save energy, following an audit during which the college found only 45 percent of its monitors were set up for energy savings. The 15 percent of monitors that are not enabled are those that are more than five years old. Machines that old "sometimes don't act very nicely with this type of software," Ms. Jadushlever says. The college currently pays 11.8 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, and it expects to spend about $630,000 for electricity this year. According to Ms. Jadushlever, a savings of $10,000 a year on energy consumed by computer monitors is small but significant. Under an energy-conservation pilot program at California State's Long Beach campus, energy consumption is measured on a building-by-building basis, says Mark A. Gutheinz, chief of plant, energy, and utilities for the Cal State system. Using the energy-saving settings on computer monitors is only one of many ways the campus tries to lower its energy consumption, he says. Faculty and staff members in buildings that achieve their energy-savings goals are rewarded with flat-screen monitors, which use only half the power that standard monitors do. Harvard's Kennedy School achieved a satisfactory level of compliance with its monitor energy-savings efforts, says Mr. Garofano, thanks in large part to the involvement of the associate dean for finance, who sent out a letter explaining what the school was trying to achieve. "Typically, when those [memos] come out from an IT director, the community looks at it and says, Uh, it's just another IT thing," Mr. Garofano says. "But when a finance dean sends it, that sends a clear message." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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