Computing giants crack down on PC power waste

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.

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

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. The organisation will also work to lower power consumption by curbing PC idle time and improving other components.

Michael Kanellos writes for CNET News.com