How many watts do the computers in your office use when your company’s shut down for the day? Should you know? Should you care?
As higher energy rates take precedence in the minds of consumers, Steven Rosenstock, manager of electric solutions at the Edison Electric Institute, said there are lots of ways businesses can save money by conserving energy.
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Example — in restaurants, where most of the energy consumed is in cooking, simple tasks like regular cleaning, which enhances heat transfer, are important. So is using a microwave wherever possible, since it saves, Rosenstock said, 70 percent of the energy that a regular oven or stove uses.
Induction ovens are also highly efficient compared to gas systems, according to researchers at the EEI’s Energy Services Group, as are “LightWave ovens” that use tungsten/halogen lamps and computer/controlled “thermal-pulsing” to direct energy into and onto food.
Businesses can operate compact fluorescent lamps instead of incandescent bulbs, Rosenstock said, and use the more efficient T-8 florescent lamps instead of T-12s, offering a savings in energy of 30 to 40 percent.
With lighting upgrades, there’s usually less than a two or three year payback, he said, meaning that a $100 upgrade would be made up in energy saved in about three years. The equipment, he said, should last about 10 years. Motors and high-efficiency air conditioners have a longer payback, between six to seven years, he said, but they also last a long time.
Regularly replacing filters – and installing high efficiency motors for fans and/or pumps are other ways of saving energy.
Business owners should keep track of unused rooms, warehouses or closets, and “just remind employees” to do simple things like turn off their personal computers and lights at night and not have several folks fiddle with the thermostat during the day. While there’s no statistic on how these factors translate into energy waste, “it’s a wide number,” Rosenstock said, that “can be significant.”
Companies should also make sure their PCs have sleep modes if they’re not shut off which bring them down to about 10 watts from 50 to 75 watts. Computers also give off heat, Rosenstock said, which hurts cooling efficiency during the summer months.
Some offices use motion sensors to save on lighting and lots of companies employ economizer cycles in their thermostats, which can put the temperature in a community building during some hours down to 50 degrees. “It depends on the nature of the building and the nature of the business,” he said.
Other energy-saving options include using LED or light emitting diodes on exit signs, the same sort of indicator lights used on a computer screen, which can save between 80 to 90 percent on energy.
Craig Hershberg, program manager for the computer electronics connection at Energy Star (a government-backed symbol for energy efficiency, jointly managed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy) said there are surprising “leaks” from standby power uses such as idle TV’s, VCR’s, cable boxes, CD players, cassette decks, cordless phones, burglar alarms, and microwaves.
These appliances continue to consume energy when switched off to keep display clocks lit and memory chips and remote controls working, costing consumers $3 billion annually in energy costs. Energy Star electronic products, Hershberg said, use less energy in standby mode.
Also, he said, using Energy Star projects can cut the typical household energy bill by about 30 percent, and if all households and businesses in the United States bought these products over the next 15 years the national annual energy bill would be reduced by about $100 billion.
According to the DOE, the energy consumed by personal computers and other types of office equipment has become a significant component of electricity consumption in commercial buildings — 13 percent (98 billion kilowatts) of all electricity consumed in 1995.
It’s nearly as much as it took to air condition all these buildings, and according to the EIA’s 1999 Annual Energy Outlook forecasts, electricity consumption for office equipment over the next two decades will grow over twice as fast as electricity use as a whole, which is 1.4 percent annually.
