Go Green, Save Lives!

Not only can going green save you money, but it’s a great way to give something back to your country.  Our country is at war; young American men and women are fighting and dying every day in Iraq.  Not wanting to make this a political position piece, I will go so far as to state that the war in Iraq has something to do with oil.  And what is oil?   It is energy.  Every business needs energy to run, to turn on the lights, run manufacturing machinery, and keep PCs running.  It is not only our civic responsibility to use our PCs’ power saving features to conserve energy, but it could save lives. 

A study by the EPA’s Energy Star program of General Electric conducted in 2001, showed that the impact of GE employing the power-management functionality of Windows XP and Windows 2000 across 75,000 PCs, setting monitors to shut down after 15 minutes, the PC itself after 30 minutes, and moving into a full “hibernate” mode after three hours yielded a result of saving $2.5 million per year in energy. The EPA estimates it was enough to power 23,000 homes each year. The reduction in carbon emissions associated with that energy was estimated at 20,000 tons — the equivalent of planting 5,600 trees.

  The IRS defines a barrel of oil equivalent equal to 1.70 MWh.  The conversions naturally follow to tell us that GE saved roughly 21,000 barrels of oil.  In October 2007 it was estimated that 2.65 million barrels of oil a day were being shipped out of Iraq.  That’s roughly 125 times what GE saved in a year.  Although GE is a large company, their PCs are but a percentage of the number of total PCs that American businesses run every day which makes it quite likely that we could as a nation save enough energy in a year to not need Iraqi oil for a week.  Since we’re averaging somewhere between 1 and 3 US soldiers killed per day, we could easily save 35 lives per year.  It is not so far fetched that configuring our computers to save energy could lower the death toll of the American military in Iraq.

Vista settings

Go to Control Panel | System and Maintenance | Power Options. From here you can select a power plan. Set your computer for Power Saver and then select Change Plan Settings. The settings shown about should help you conserve energy while not interfering with your work habits. Naturally, the battery versus plugged-in setting are relevant only for portable computers.

Before exiting the Power Options applet, click Change advanced power settings and then set the Hard disk | Turn off hard disk option.

Click OK, then click Save Changes.

XP Settings

In Windows XP, these settings are found under Control Panel | Power Options.