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Re: [News] Linux Starup Receives $21 Million Investment

Peter Hayes wrote: 
> In Roy Schestowitz wrote: 
>
>> In the summer of 2001 I made an exception and read Bill
>> Bryson's book on American culture (I rarely read
>> textbooks, if ever). one of the chapters (taken from his
>> fortnightly newspaper culumn) analysed the issue of
>> electricity consumption in great depth. It concentrated on
>> PC's and lights. The 'waste culture' is something that's
>> costing a lot not just in terms of money. It also harms
>> the environment. And many have a muchly-justified pet
>> peeve that gets them annoyed when they see this. In fact,
>> here on British radio and TV there seems to have been this
>> large-scale campaign recently (many the past month) whose
>> focus is the amount of money one saves by switching off
>> unneeded lights/ lighting sources. I can't recall if PC's
>> were part of the message. 
> 
> Apparantly, all the domestic A/V equipment, TV, VHS, Sat
> box, etc currently left on standby in the UK consumes the
> output of one large power station. Add in the 50 million or
> so DVB-T boxes we'll need after analogue switch-off and
> that's another power station, or the entire output of all
> those windfarms springing up in areas of outstanding 
> natural beauty. 
> 
> But all this is only relevent in the summer. The rest of
> the time TVs, PCs etc add to background heating so nett
> cost is zero or thereabouts. 

Those windfarms unfortunately more often than not must be
backed by fossil, nuclear or hydro power.  Customers require
reliable utility power; other power must be supplied when
there is insufficient wind to provide utility grade power. 
This means a minimum of a 15 MPH (24 KMH) breeze to keep wind
farms operational. 

Usually when power is needed is in mid summer for air
conditioning demand, when winds tend to be at less than
optimal. 

A savvy corporate culture will ensure that by allowing
desktops to go into hiberation, waken by a LAN call for
maintenance and updates will save them overhead expenses with
electrical utility savings. 

Figure that instead of keeping PC's powered on, that they
could hibernate after 20 minutes of inactivity.  During an 8
hour work day, figuring an average employee is away from
his/her desk for 2 hours and a 1 hour lunch break gives us PC
on for 6.67 hours per day. 

Per
http://www.phmsa.dot.gov/about/competitive/attachmentd.html 

annual productive hours are say, 1,776 per year per employee.
This discounts for vacations, sick days, holidays, etc. 

1,776 hours/year : 8 hours/day = 222 productive days/year.

6.67 hours/day x 222 days/year = 1480.74 hours/year PC is on
for employee. 

Figure PC has antivirus updates pushed weekly and entire disk
is scanned weekly, update and full disk scan takes 1.5 hours. 

(1.5 hours/week + 0.33 hibernate delay) x 52 weeks/year =
95.2 hours/year for full scan virus checks.  Figure same for 
defrag.

Updates are pushed every other week for applications and
operating system, say take say 45 minutes. 

(0.75 hours/biweek + 0.33 hibernate delay) x 26 biweeks/year
= 28.1 hours/year for updates. 

Hours on per year = 1480.74 employee + 95.2 virus check +
95.2 defrag + 28.1 updates = 1699.2 hours. 

Potential hours off are 365 days/year x 24 hours/day - 1699
hours = 7,061 hours. 

Per http://uk.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/19/81216/5460

at electrical costs of 11.89p/kWh, an office with 100 PC's
has a potential annual savings of: 

60 Watts x 1/1000 kWh/Watt x 7,061 x 100 PC's = 42,366 kWh x
11.89p = 5,037 GBP or 9,328 USD. 

According to

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/CollinTam.shtml

at average kWh costing 14.31 cents in New York, savings are
6,063 USD or 3,274 GBP. 

It may seem trivial when dealing with multimillion dollar or
quid budgets, but those are low hanging fruit savings. 

--
HPT

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