Well isn't that a nice thought? According to Dell, if all the 400 million PCs and notebooks in the world would consume 30% less energy, the 56 billion kWh saved would be enough to power Switzerland for a year.
So how are we supposed to do that?
Dell suggests to buy a PC with power management settings preset as on, like its "energy smart" business PCs (OptiPlex, Lattitude and soon Precision lines). Unfortunately, nothing on the consumer PC side yet.

"The power management settings is going to make the difference... more efficient power supplies is going to save a few dollars a year but it's going to cost you more... but real savings is going to come when that system that has been running 8 hours a day is being turned off for the other 16 hours a day... that's when you are going to see some energy benefits", said Jon Weisblatt, senior manager at Dell.

As you'll see in the video, the Dell manager was a bit deceptive (on purpose or not, I'm not sure) by comparing the $40 billion associated to energy costs related to servers in the US alone and the 56 billion kWh consumed by all desktops/notebooks worldwide. Which turns out to be $5.6 billion and not $56 billion, like Weisblatt said!

So here's an interesting reality check:
- he compared hard dollars with kilowatt hours, US-only data versus worldwide;
- and inflated the dollar amount saved... well by 10 times!

Despite the criticism, I agree that desktop power settings set to "on" by default would definitely help. My HP PC is "on" all the time, even when I'm not home but I just don't want to be sitting there waiting it to boot, every time I have to turn it on. And I just don't have the time to configure the cryptic BIOS either! Is it just me?

Dell consolidates data center to save power

Weisblatt went on to describe some of Dell's findings after a recent server consolidation project in its Austin, Texas data center.

About 40% of total power consumption there was being taken by the IT equipment itself, 30% by the power distribution systems and 30% by air cooling and conditioning.

Of the power consumed by the IT gears, about 60% were servers, 22% by storage, and 18% was networking gear.

Despite data growing 100% per year, Dell does not have yet much to say about their plans to save power on storage systems.

Within the servers, 30% of power was driven by the CPUs, 20% was consumed by the power supplies, and the rest by system memories, fans, voltage regulators, etc.

By using more power efficient components in its "energy smart" servers, users could expect to consume 25% less power at a comparable performance than Dell's regular servers at a cost of $100 more. But according to Weisblatt the customers will save 200$ in energy costs per year and the difference pays it off in less than six months.

And you are going to keep this server 3 to 4 yrs... and imagine a rack full of these... then you are talking about some significant energy savings