Reducing your carbon footprint, the easy way

Following on from my last article that talked about the coal mining industry and how the automation reduced risk and increased output within the mines during the 20^th century, I thought it prudent to go on to discuss how we can use these lessons to reduce our own carbon footprints in an easy manner, reducing our costs as we go.
At 1E we have been helping customers significantly reduce their carbon footprint while saving millions of dollars along the way for the last 18 years. During this time, we have devised a simple methodology that we use together with our customers that is known as AOR (Analyze, Optimize and Realize). There is more information available here on AOR, but in essence we took our domain expertise, amassed over those 18 years and built this into the world’s number 1 PC energy management solution, NightWatchman Enterprise. The software is placed into a reporting mode where it takes no corrective action across the PC estate, but during this time records usage and up time of the equipment. We therefore Analyze the current environment via quick and easy reporting, made across the estate, to demonstrate how much energy is being used and thus how much is being wasted. At this time, should you wish you can engage with our Financial Analyst team who can delve deeper into the statistics to further determine overspend beyond the controls of just the power usage to help you really grab a hold of IT spending.
Once we have the understanding of what wastage there is out there, we can Optimize our environment by implementing a PC Power Policy with the NightWatchman Enterprise solution enabling the user population to continue to make use of their PC as and when they need, but for the business to be in control of when the PC is able to go to sleep and thus begin the carbon footprint reduction.
The final stage to the methodology is to Realize the savings by implementing the PC policy across the desktop estate, thus initiating the software to automatically manage the energy usage per desktop.
The 1E team then continue to work with the customer to ensure an ongoing optimization process takes place as part of the AOR methodology, ensuring that as time passes not only do those initial savings get realized but that further additional savings will be assessed and managed, adding to the total as each year passes by.
The more PCs that are in the enterprise desktop estate, the greater the potential saving of course. So for example Arup, a leading structural engineering firm, makes savings equivalent to the annual greenhouse emissions of 81 modern passenger vehicles or the energy use of 40 homes in one year, both of which represent a saving of approximately 442 Metric Tonnes of CO2 per year. Within the business Arup already encouraged the staff to shut their PC down when not in use, but despite implementing this policy the organization found that there were still more than 25% of PCs left on overnight during the week and 20% during each weekend. Today, NightWatchman Enterprise ensures that the desktops are shut-down overnight when not required (but are awoken to patch during the night before being put back to sleep) and awoken just before the user has a need to use the device in the morning, saving boot time.
Similarly Aviva, the world’s 6^th largest insurance group (with almost 54 million customers worldwide), are equally committed to corporate responsibility, resulting in a requirement to reduce their carbon footprint. Aviva found that despite best efforts, over 60% of PCs were left powered on overnight during the week and 57% at the weekends, so an implementation of NightWatchman Enterprise enabled the company to save more than 5 million kWh (Kilowatt hours), in turn representing 2812 metric tonnes of CO2 per annum, helping the business exceed their corporate responsibility goals on an annual basis.
So, as can be seen, reducing your carbon footprint is as simple as AOR. 1E can help you understand the energy usage across your enterprise estate and help you plan for a better tomorrow with savings of typically $26 per PC per annum. Come and read more about NightWatchman here or simply contact us at [email protected] for more information. We would be delighted to talk with you and see what we can do to help.