Tech companies unite for greener PC power supplies

The PC power chain has to got to get in shape, according to a group of technology companies.

Google, Intel and a host of PC and component companies on Tuesday unfurled the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, an effort to increase energy efficiency in PCs.

At the heart of the initiative is a push to get PC makers and consumers to adopt more efficient power supplies and voltage regulators. These two components, working together, convert AC power from a wall socket to 12-volt DC power that a computer uses.

Roughly 50 per cent of the power delivered from a wall socket to a PC never actually performs any work, according to Urs Hölzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations. Half the energy gets converted to heat or is dissipated in some other manner in the AC-to-DC conversion. Around 30 per cent of the power delivered to the average server gets lost, he added. The power in both cases is lost before any work is accomplished by a computer -- later, even more energy is lost by PCs sitting idle, or as heat dissipated by other components.

By adopting more energy-efficient components, PCs and servers can utilise 90 per cent or more of the electricity delivered to them. Google's own servers, in fact, are already 90 to 93 per cent efficient.

"This is not a technology problem. We have power supplies with 90 per cent efficiency shipping today," Hölzle said.

The problem is cost, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel. Making a PC more power efficient in this manner adds about $20 to its retail cost, and it adds about $30 to the cost of a server.

Part of the initiative is to figure out ways to eliminate this price difference, Gelsinger added. Some utilities in the US, such as California's Pacific Gas and Electric are toying with giving consumers rebates for buying energy-efficient PCs. Volume production will eventually eliminate any additional costs, he said. The chances are, energy-efficient PCs and servers will take off in Japan, Europe and North America first, and later in more cost-conscious markets like China.

The organisation will also work to lower power consumption by curbing PC idle time and improving other components. At the moment, an un-optimised PC consumes about $30 a year in electricity to operate, said Gelsinger. An optimised PC can drop that figure to $10, he said.

Under Climate Savers' wish list, generic PCs and servers will be at least 90 per cent efficient by 2010. If that goal can be met, these power-efficient servers and PCs will save 71.6 billion kilowatts of electricity in that year, said Gelsinger. The amount of electricity saved would result in 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide not being put into the air that year.

PC makers are also trying to come up with ways to show how energy-efficient PCs can help a company's bottom line by lowering power consumption. Dell, for instance, sells an energy-efficient server. It costs $100 more than a typical, similar server, but the energy savings pay for the additional costs in a year, said Jon Weisblatt, senior manager of energy efficiency at Dell.

Weisblatt also added that Dell ships PCs with Windows Vista with the energy-efficient settings turned on. In general, most PC vendors ship their boxes with the efficiency setting turned off.