Power Cleaner

Last night and tonight I have been the last person to leave the office. Before I left both nights I turned off all the monitors that had been left on (35 last night and 32 tonight). This company's standard PC build doesn't include any power management features, so if I hadn't turned them off then they would have stayed on all night.

A monitor uses roughly 180watts of electricity. Assuming the "night" is 6pm to 8.30am that makes 14.5 hours per monitor, which for 35 monitors means that 94.5 Kwh of electricity would have been wasted. I did some research and estimate that 94.5 Kwh could produce 4 158 000 pages from a photocopier, power a freezer for 23 days, or power a washing machine for 378 loads.

Factoring this up for a year (assuming that the monitors stay on all weekend) you get 38.7 Mwh of electricity wasted at a cost of £2400 (not to mention 35 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide, 77.5Kg of Nitrogen Oxide and 318 Kg of Sulphur Dioxide released into the atmosphere).

Now work it out for the number of people that work with computers, assuming that 40% forget to turn their monitor off each evening - a conservative estimate for the UK (based on 8 million computers) gives 3.9Twh of wasted electricity at a cost of £240 million, and 3.5 million metric tonnes of CO2, 7 750 metric tonnes of NO and 31 800 metric tonnes of SO2 released. For the US you could probably bung an extra 0 onto the end.

Now, what do most of the organisations that run these computer monitors also have in common? Cleaners who have access to the whole building. So here's the idea ("finally" I hear you cry). Select a number of cleaners and subject them to training along the lines of "Whilst you're doing your rounds, if you see a monitor which is on then turn it off, unless there's a note asking you not to. Don't worry about the computers themselves". Pay these people an extra £1 per hour for this task (if they turn off six monitors every hour the company is saving money).

The benefits: low paid workers get more money (hurrah!), companies save money (hurrah!), we use less electricity so we create less pollutants (hurrah!) and there would be less power problems in California (hurrah!).

The disadvantages: generating companies would make less money and people would have to spend a fraction of a second each morning turning their monitors on.