Energy Management in Practice

Tackling Hard to Reach Distributed Energy Losses in the Non-Intensive Energy Use Sector – Power Management in PCs

With the new Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) regulations, many businesses are about to face the realities of carbon budgeting for the first time. Organisations will be required to buy allowances to cover their CO2 emissions; top performers will receive financial rewards; and poor performers will be penalised.

The CRC uses electricity consumption as a means for determining which organisations fall under the new regulations, and covers all organisations with an electricity consumption of greater than 6,000 MWH per year (equivalent to emissions of approximately 1,280 tonnes CO2 per year from electricity use). Organisations must purchase allowances to cover all of their CO2 emissions with the exception of transport.

The CRC will incentivise energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reduction in the non-energy intensive sector of business and industry. As well as driving supply side measures to reduce the carbon intensity of energy consumed, the CRC will also provide big incentives for demand side energy efficiency. Once quick wins have been identified, attention will become more and more focused on harder to reach energy losses. These include energy losses distributed across organisations due to the organisations physical infrastructure, and also the way it uses energy consuming devices.

Invisible Energy Losses

Whilst most people are familiar with measures such as smart lighting systems using low energy bulbs and motion sensitive switching, a ubiquitous energy demand across all businesses is the personal computer. A typical PC will use in the order of 90 watts when active (approximately 50 watts for the base unit, and 40 watts for a typical LCD screen); and three to four watts when ‘asleep’.

With up to 25% of a modern office’s electricity demand being used to feed an ever-growing IT infrastructure, and PCs and monitors accounting for nearly 40% of IT energy demand, PC power management is a key aspect of facilities energy management. Recent research [1]shows that across the industrialised economies, major and unnecessary energy losses occur simply through people failing to power down their PCs when they leave work.

In the UK, it is estimated £300 million per year in energy costs are wasted, and 1.3 million tonnes CO2 emitted as a result. In the US, where research shows over 50% of PCs are left on overnight, the figures are even higher - $2.8 billion and 20 million tonnes of CO2 per year – the equivalent of the whole of Estonia’s CO2 emissions.

It is also the case that whilst PCs do allow low power settings to be used, there are many situations, especially in a networked environment, where processes running on the computer will prevent the in-built low power settings from taking effect. This can have a dramatic effect on energy use that is invisible to the user. T

he monitor may have gone into standby mode, and the PC may appear to be idle, but operational testing by 1E, a specialist software and services IT consultancy, shows that on any given day an average of over 50% of an organisations computers would fail to go to sleep, and over time this happened to over 90% of the machines. This means that the actual power use of ‘sleeping’ computers is over 7.5 times the expected ‘sleeping’ power demand.

Sleepless PCs

There are three things that prevent a computer from switching to sleep mode. These are:

· user activity (keyboard input or mouse movement);

· CPU Activity above a threshold (by default 20% overall CPU utilisation);

· a process actively requesting that the computer remains awake.Further detailed analysis showed that all of these things were happening on various computers and at various times of day and night for a variety of reasons:

some computers had faulty mice which caused pointer drift, making the operating system think that a user was continually moving the mouse;

others had installed utility software that attempted to actually prevent the computer from sleeping by periodically sending a spurious key press event;some applications would periodically run internal maintenance tasks causing spikes in CPU activity, but doing no useful work;

some applications would raise a ‘System required’ flag preventing the computer from sleeping. Sometimes this was where users had left applications open that were playing music, or in ‘presentation’ mode. A lot of the time this was because the application had a file open across the network.

Energy Management Solutions

PCs refusing to sleep, and the subsequent waste of energy, is difficult to manage across a network using a computer's internal energy management settings.
However, a very effective energy management tool, NightWatchman, has been developed by 1E that addresses these problems, and also allows network administrators to automatically wake up machines for eg network maintenance and corporate software upgrades, and power them down afterwards. Using this energy management tool on an organisations network has been demonstrated to save on average 200 kg of CO2 emissions per PC per year, and generate £26 per PC per year in energy savings.

The NightWatchman tool has been extensively used in many organisations over the last eight years. With over 4.5 million users globally, it represents a tried and tested energy management system that attacks a particularly hard to reach distributed energy loss. CO2 emissions savings of over 900,000 tonnes, and energy savings of over £110 million are made each year by NightWatchman users across the world. This type of energy management tool can be a very powerful weapon in an environmental or facilities manager’s armoury. An organisation such as a large consultancy with 4,000 employees would be able to make CO2 emissions savings of over 800 tonnes and over £100,000 per year in energy savings. A large corporation with 50,000 employees could save 10,000 tonnes of CO2 and over £1.3 million per year in energy costs.

Implications for the CRC

By looking at IT operations and energy use, proven energy management tools such as NightWatchman demonstrate that the CRC target of 4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions reduced by 2020 is readily achievable. With the reward and penalty system under the CRC, organisations will be continually pushed to improve their emissions reduction performance. Energy management solutions such as NightWatchman turn a very hard to reach energy loss into an easily achievable and quantifiable efficiency gain. This type of solution can help organisations maintain leadership positions in CRC league tables, so as well as very significant energy cost savings, financial rewards under the CRC can be ploughed back into the organisation, making a very clear business case for effective environmental management.



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1[] PC Energy Report 2009, 1E, Alliance to Save Energy, Harris Interactive, March 2009

Watch 'Pig Business' - Tonight on More 4

On 30 June the British TV channel More 4 will broadcast a shocking documentary, PIG BUSINESS, which exposes for the first time the real cost of ‘cheap’ pig meat – the appalling conditions in factory farms endured by both animals and workers, the environmental pollution, the destruction of rural economies.

You’ve probably heard that Swine Flu emerged just upwind of a swine plant owned by Smithfield, a giant multinational corporation and the world’s biggest pig meat processors – that is no surprise, overcrowded pig factories are known incubators of disease and superbugs.

Smithfield does not want the truth to get out. They have already managed to stop the film being shown once, by threatening a ruinously expensive legal action. Even national newspapers trying to report on the film have been bullied into silence. We think Smithfield will keep trying: this is a case of David v Goliath, and David needs some support!

Here is what you can do:

1) Make a diary note to watch the film – 30 June, 10pm, More 4.

2) Check out the website www.PigBusiness.co.uk, view the trailer and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/PigBusiness

3)Exercise your consumer power: buy outdoor-bred and -reared pork in a local farmers market, or ask your supermarket to supply it.

4)Tell all your friends and contacts and encourage them to do the same.

Ditch the strimmer and have some fun

I recently decided to cut down on fuel usage wherever possible, but aside from the usual suspects of car/tractor/quad bike usage, I've almost completely stopped using the strimmer.
I guess I was getting a bit sick of having to go out with ear defenders, safety glasses etc and being surrounded by a cloud of fumes and noise.

Now we had a couple of old scythes here which my grandfather and father had used, but as usual I went out in search of something better. So I am now the proud owner of an Austrian scythe from Simon Fairlie of The Scythe Shop who imports them into the UK.

I was a little sceptical as to whether the scythe could replicate the workrate of the strimmer, so I had a bit of a 'strim off' with my mate Adrian. We have a farm track which needed the sides tidying up so I set off down one side and Ade down the other. I finished my side without even breaking into a sweat, and was truly taken aback by the volume of grass and weeds that this baby could take down! Ade however was still plodding along with the strimmer - at about half the rate..

Anyway, being a bit of a geek I had to dig further into the interweb on all things scythey - and of course I discovered a whole world of scythe geeks...enjoy the silence..
b7dft3nr2v

One Man, One Cow, One Planet - watch this

I watched this DVD the other day and it was quite inspiring. It follows Peter Proctor, worldwide authority on soil and biodynamics, on his journey through India. He's trying to provide an alternative to India's tens of thousands of small farmers who are struggling under the constant pressures of corporate agri-business.
What I found really shocking was the number of farmers who have actually committed suicide because they just can't make ends meet.

Anyway, definitely worth 56 minutes of your time - so watch it if you get a chance. You can also buy a copy here.

http://www.howtosavetheworld.co.nz

That damn dog!

'that damn dog!' is a term of endearment for Timmy our one eyed sheepdog. She will crop up from time to time, as she is prone to wandering, and generally getting into scrapes.

Today however she is mostly sleeping and eating my biscuits as I'm working on some stuff for my friends over at 1E . It's nice to have the choice actually, if the weather is a tad inclement, I simply change hats and go into my little office and blog..

FP

No broadband, not even skinnyband!

To cut a long story short, we're too far from the exchange (so says Mr BT Engineer anyway) to get any kind of ADSL working here at the farm, so I did a bit of poking around and found a solution..
I've been using Mobile Broadband from Orange quite successfully, and today I came across these routers, which can be used to share the connection.

http://www.nucleusnetworks.co.uk/3g-router/billion-bipac-7402nx.htm

scorchio!

FP