Greening of Campus IT
The cost of energy on our campus is about $25 million/year and growing. Almost 100% of our campus electricity is purchased from Xcel Energy. We use about 15,000 desktops/laptops which consume about 4%-5% of total campus electricity (not including associated HVAC cooling load for campus data centers and desktops).
Our request is simple. We need to make sure every PC monitor is enabled to go to sleep mode after 10 minutes of inactivity. As you know, monitors use the majority of power on a typical desktop setup. While the monitor is in power managed (sleep) mode, your network connectivity is maintained and the monitor is back up with a stroke of any key or movement of the mouse. Secondly, we are asking people to turn off their desktops after hours and on weekends. These are a couple of green ideas without any cost or negative side effects. For more information, please see our article in the Fall 2008 edition of One on One, Greening of Campus IT.
CSR Awards
This year, the Energy Conservation Department created the CSR Awards to exemplify outstanding work in the energy conservation of the campus IT. To be eligible, a CSR must meet five categories of energy conservation:
- Power Management: Computers must be power managed to go to sleep after 10 minutes.
- Energy Smart buying: Recent purchases of computer equipment should when possible be "energy star" compliant
- Encourage turning off equipment: Power management posters should be present in departments
- Printers: Printers should be power managed and consolidated so that unnecessary printers are removed.
- Replacing CRTs: CRT monitors waste energy, LCD monitors should be requested or should be present in the department.
This year we had three winners, selected at random from those who completed the requirements of the CSR award. Each winner won a $100 gift card. This year the winners were:
- Tim Price
- Kelly Duong
- Karen Schuster
Congratulations!
