http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/mercury.txt

http://jwz.livejournal.com/94645.html

Having lived through the ice storm, no juice for a month in the dead of a Quebec winter, I can relate to this. Here's the question: With all that infrastructure world-wide coming up to (or well past) its' best-before date, and demand for power showing no sign of declining (what - you want to plug how many cars into Con Edison's lousy power drop???) - is it time to start aggresively switching offices from desktops to DTRs - (desktop replacements, aka laptops).

Consider - even back in 2001, this DOE (Department of Energy) paper shows desktops consuming 3x the juice of laptops. Desktop video cards, cpus, and motherboards have gotten hungrier - Vista isn't exactly a "green" operating system, and neither are "gaming rigs".

Or this 2006 paper

Summary After lighting, computers and monitors have the highest energy consumption in office environments. Studies have shown that power management of computers and monitors can significantly reduce their energy consumption, saving hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on electricity costs. The energy consumption of computers and monitors is determined by the amount of energy they require to operate and how they are used. While the energy requirements of a device make an important contribution to its overall energy consumption, the key to reducing energy consumption is changing how devices are used. Approximately half of all office computers are left on overnight and on weekends. Evenings and weekends account for 75% of the week, so ensuring computers are turned off at night dramatically reduces their energy consumption. Further savings are made by ensuring computers enter low power mode when they are idle during the day. Power management is a way of ensuring computers and monitors are turned off when not required and in low power mode during idle periods. Manual power management, which relies on education users to turn off their computers, can achieve impressive results with ongoing education and reinforcement. Alternatively, automatic power management relies on software, or built in energy saving features. Theoretically, automatic power management can achieve 100% power management, with all computers turned off when not required and in low power mode when idle.

Between server consolidation and replacing desktops with more energy-efficient laptops (or in some cases, netbooks), it should be possible to achieve at least a 2/3 power savings. Throw in the extra savings from reduced heat (less AC needed) and noise, and the savings should pay for the equipment.

Throw in desktop consolidation - replacing that second (or in some cases 2nd and third) desktop + kvm switch) with an external screen, and the savings increase (most of the people where I work have at least 2 desktops and one server allocated to them - consolidation would be a big win here, plus make it a lot easier to back up and restore!!! Reducing the "component count" - the number of boxes running, will also reduce the number of interruptions due to "component" failures, and consolidation would mean that it would be possible to have a "live spare" and still reduce the box count).

So, what about home servers?

I rarely turn mine on any more. Eventually, I'll probably give it away, and when I buy another laptop, take my current laptop and have it become my "home server". Just the "quiet factor" is a good enough reason to go that route, and if I end up needing more than 1 tb of disk space, there's always external storage. With the screen powered down, it uses something like 1/8 the power of my old box, so why not ...

We've reached the "crossover point" where the additional energy savings from lcds and laptops justify the junking of most desktops, and the consolidation of what's left. Being "greener" is a nice side benefit, but the "show me the money" aspect is what works in todays' economy.