Technology for the Physical Plant: Building Smarts

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Technology for the Physical Plant: Building Smarts

7/5/2007

By Matt Villano

At Adelphi University, machines in the campus computer labs were wasting 2,520,000 watts of power every night, until software was installed to automatically shut down the computers at 11 pm. The school now saves $9,000 of ‘found’ money each month, or $108,000 each year.

According to CIO Jack Chen, the business case for this product was compelling. The school has nearly 700 computers in labs across campus, he reports, with machines each averaging 300 watts per hour while idle. Throw in energy usage from monitors, he adds (roughly 150 watts per hour), and all told, the campus computer labs were wasting 315,000 watts of power each hour or 2,520,000 watts over the course of an eight-hour night.

ON THE HORIZON for Adelphi: Interfacing its DriveShield program with a course schedule, to predict lab usage over time and shut down computers one hour after the last class ends each day.

Chen realized that shutting down the machines would save big bucks, so he bought DriveShield last year, installed it on each machine and programmed the software to automatically shut down computers at 11 pm. With electricity in that region at 13 cents per kilowatt hour, shutting down the machines for eight hours now saves about $327.60 each night, $9,000 each month, and $108,000 annually.

“It’s amazing when you think about how much we’re saving just by shutting these things off each night,” Chen says. “People forget how much energy computers use when they’re just sitting there waiting for someone to use them.”

Down the road, he adds, the school will look into expanding the shutdown program to determine which computers can be shut down even earlier in the evening. To accomplish this, he says, the school will need to interface the Drive- Shield program with a course schedule to predict lab usage over time. Ultimately, he says, the goal will be to shut down computers exactly one hour after the last class has ended.

Another project on the horizon is an effort to minimize printing costs and the energy required to power campus printers. The school is investigating the use of Pcounter software from AND Technologies, to limit to 500 the number of pages students can print per semester. Once students exceed this amount, they would have to pay 5 cents per page. Expected savings: $25,000 per year in toner and paper alone.

“Printing is a big expense,” says Chen, who notes that expected savings wouldn’t even account for the money saved by reducing energy usage across the board. “Some savings here, some savings there—all of a sudden, you’ve saved quite a bit.” And such savings—as most CIOs know—can mean newfound funding for other initiatives previously unable to get off the planning board.