There is a huge and apparently unrecognised opportunity to save wasted energy in these client machines.

The majority of the PCs are in business premises, where they are typically installed in desk arrangements with power fed from floor sockets. At lunchtimes and overnight / weekends, the users of these machines may carefully ‘turn off’ the PC from Windows, or if their IT manager has been smart he may have set up Windows so the PC goes into standby or hibernate after a period of inactivity. The users do not switch off the power to the machine at the floor socket (in many cases the floor socket is unreachable unless you want to crawl through a rather unpleasant collection of old food wrappers, dead biros and dust balls)

Unfortunately, the Windows PC is still consuming power when it is ‘turned off’, and left switched on at the mains socket. In fact on my PC it is exactly the same power as in ‘standby’ or ‘hibernate’. A check with a simple low cost energy meter will verify this. OK, it’s a relatively low power level, like 15 watts, but multiply this by hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide and you have a significant level of completely unnnecessary energy usage and GHG emissions. It can’t help either with building temperature control in the summer to have hundreds of PCs pushing out a little heat all night long.

For the domestic user, it’s usually relatively easy to get to the mains switch on the power socket. In the office environment it can be a lot more difficult.

IT managers in large organisations need to be aware of this, and try to find workable solutions. Maybe get the power distribution systems for their call centres etc designed to be easily switched off in zones at the end of a shift.

And PC manufacturers need to give us a no-power state when we select ‘turn-off’ from Windows.