Installing energy-saving power boards delivered an ROI of 27%.
Everyone laughed when I suggested installing energy saving power boards. After all, we already had leading edge EnergyStar rated equipment. So I did some research, and they were kind of right – EnergyStar-rated monitors in sleep mode consume only 2W. But then I looked closer.
On every desk, all manner of devices are left on – external speakers are a good example. So I did the math, looked at what we were paying per Kilowatt hour, and invested in the energy-saving power boards. Net result: an impressive ROI of 27%. Payback period: just over 3.5 years.
Over the last year, we’ve completed a few projects that have contributed to energy savings, upgrading our air-conditioning to using inverter technology in our server room, our server virtualisation project, and all the team having notebooks – it all adds up!
The biggest area of saving is coming from our server virtualisation project using Citrix Xen Server (which reminds me to congratulate Greig McGill, Kyle Carter and Carl Buckley on their certification success on Citrix Xen Server Enterprise). Xen is ultra efficient in how it uses RAM and CPU to run multiple workloads – so the net effect is that we need fewer physical servers. Fewer servers equals less energy consumed – at every level.
I checked back on our financials: since April ‘06 the price of electricity has risen by 11.08%, we have added 4 team members, we are running more internal systems and servers and yet our overall energy costs are down. It mightn’t be easy being green – but it pays off.
One of our next projects to reduce energy costs is to run the new version of IBM Director along with Active Energy Manager – will report the findings.