Ongoing ICT energy costs and your carbon footprint
I’ve been involved in a couple or recent projects looking at new school builds and refits. The usual situation is one where there is a pot of capital cash set aside for ICT that is used to buy computers, whiteboards, projectors and so on. The procurement and installation charges are usually considered separately from the ongoing, day-by-day costs of running the equipment, as this is the way in which the budgets are allocated. As environmental issues, and in particular carbon footprints, are in the news at the moment, I thought I’d have a look at the ongoing energy costs it ICT.
It turns out that your choice of display device (and even graphics card) can have an impact on the amount of energy used– and hence your electricity costs and impact on the environment. In my experience, these factors are not often taken into consideration. Spending more on the initial unit price per ‘box’ could save you more over the lifetime of the equipment.
Coding Horror gives an example of how to calculate the energy costs of leaving a home PC on all day for a whole year. In this example, the PC’s power use was measured to be about 160 Watts. This converts into about 1400 Kilowatt-hours over the course of a year. On his page ‘How much electricity do computers use?‘, Michael Bluejay gives examples of the power used by some Dell machines along with the power consumption in standby mode and so on. Whilst the PCs listed are old, the figures still give a good indication of typical energy use. What’s also interesting is to note that a 17″ LCD display uses under half the power of a 17″ CRT. Having a mostly black screen instead of a mostly white screen can save about 10 Watts of power!
Whilst these figures may seem small, in a school with over 300 computers the numbers soon add up. Sirius have looked at energy consumption by computers in UK schools. They have calculated (including servers, air-conditioning…) that a school could be spending up to £20,000 on electricity for ICT. They work this out to be 186 tonnes of carbon dioxide. See the electricity consumption page on their website for more details.
The Coding Horror site has some advice on how you can reduce the power draw of the PCs you leave on including:
- Configure the hard drives to sleep on inactivity.
- Upgrade to a more efficient power supply.
- Don’t use a high-end video card.
- Configure the monitor to sleep on inactivity
- Disconnect peripherals you don’t use.
Sirius suggest dramatic cost and carbon dioxide savings by using a thin-client network.
The ongoing energy costs should be incorporated into any total cost of ownership model for ICT. The Becta ICT Investment Planner can be adapted to accommodate the annual electricity costs and carbon footprint. I think working out the total cost of ownership is a vital aspect of any self-review or audit of ICT provision and is essential before embarking on any strategic planning or developments in ICT. It would certainly be a good idea to understand the contribution that ICT is making to a school’s electricity costs.
In addition to the role played in global warming, there are other pressing needs to look at the energy implications of ICT in schools. The amount of power use in schools is set to increase significantly and the cost of electricity is also likely to rise.
The Sustainable Development Commission in their ‘UK Schools Carbon Footprint Scoping Study’ state that:
The fastest growth in emissions is likely to come from electricity consumption by ICT, particularly interactive technologies such as whiteboards and digital projectors. Energy consumption by computers in schools has already doubled in the last five years.
The Sustainable Development Commission quote a figure typical figure of 300 Watts for an interactive whiteboard. So if the whiteboard were to be used for 4 hours a day on 190 days of the year, we would get
300 Watts x 4 hrs x 190 Days /1000 = 228 Kilowatt-hours.
Using a conversion factor from The National Energy Foundation gives
228 Kw-hrs x 0.43= 98 Kg of carbon dioxide per year
A couple of years ago, we were given a grant from the government for interactive whiteboards. With that money and schools’ contributions, I estimate we installed about 350 new whiteboard bundles locally. This gives a figure of over 34 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year based on the figures above!
To quote The Sustainable Development Commission:
In terms of procurement, energy efficiency remains a relatively low priority, although the government will be encouraging improved compliance with good practice guidance from OGC.
On their website, Becta state that:
If TCO is being introduced as part of an overall strategy for improvement, whether at LEA or school level, then a more complex analysis will be required. This would need to include both monetary costs and benefits and also intangible ones, especially those relating to educational benefits to pupils.
I would suggest it is time to add energy and environmental costs to that too.