E.ON UK, a power and gas supplier to 4.9 million homes
across the country, has cut its electricity bill for 10,000 PCs and
monitors by £140,000 a year by automatically switching them off
when they are not being used.
The savings follow an 18-month UK roll-out of SMS Companion
scheduling software, which automatically powers down IBM and HP PCs
and monitors across its UK network.
The UK IT department¹s green strategy will support a business
commitment to cut annual non-powerstation carbon emissions by
10%.
"We have been given clear business targets for carbon reduction
from the board that they expect the business to make and these have
helped. This was not an IT-only initiative it was done in
partnership with the business," said John Middleditch, chief
technical officer of E.ON UK.
The company has decided to keep its CRT monitors rather than
invest in LCD displays. The total carbon emissions for the life of
CRT monitors from construction, use and disposal narrows
significantly when compared with LCD ones, said Middleditch.
"The life case for scrapping all your CRTs is non-existent or
small. So we have decided to keep our CRTs until the end of their
natural life before replacing them."
The biggest challenge in reducing the firm's IT energy
consumption was moving beyond "low hanging fruit" such as powering
down PCs to more long-term, ambitious projects, such as reducing
staff travel through collaboration technologies, he said.
The UK division will roll out desktop conferencing software between
UK sites and provide Cisco TelePresence video conferencing between
international locations by the end of June 2008 to cut road and air
travel.
A long-term goal for the group is to move to greener
datacentres. But IT suppliers would have to prove that not only is
their IT equipment greener, but that it has the same level of
reliability as existing equipment before switching, said
Middleditch.