Lazy staff driving up electricity bills

Employees who leave their PCs on overnight are costing their companies £70 each per year, according to a report produced by the National Energy Foundation.

The report found 18 per cent of UK-based office workers never turn off their PC when they go home and a further 13 per cent frequently leave their PC on after hours.

The result of this neglect is spiralling electricity use for the businesses concerned and additional carbon dioxide emissions across the UK equivalent to the output of 120,000 4x4 cars.

The report found workers did not turn off their PCs for five main reasons:

• They can't be bothered (17.5 per cent)
• No one else in their office does (10 per cent)
• Because it's unimportant (10 per cent)
• They forget (eight per cent)
• They are afraid of losing their work (1.8 per cent)

A spokesman for the National Energy Foundation said: "This is a problem for two reasons. Energy prices have doubled in the last 24 months, and companies' expenditure on electricity is obviously directly affecting their profits."

He added that leaving PCs on overnight is also causing environmental harm. "Electricity is the dirtiest fuel we use and there is an awful lot of carbon dioxide generated, which is the main greenhouse gas. That gives us problems with climate change," he said.

The UK government has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by the middle of the century.

The spokesman suggested business managers should insist staff shut down their PCs when they are not being used. He added that IT managers might consider deploying software that automatically shuts down unused PCs - or sends them into hibernation.

According to analyst group Gartner, companies' electricity usage is set to rocket further - particularly because of energy-sapping high performance data centres.

Gartner vice president Rakesh Kumar predicted last week that companies which do not control their energy usage could end up spending half their IT budget on energy.

UK businesses waste £115m each year by leaving unattended PCs switched on, according to the National Energy Foundation.

A business with 20,000 employees typically has around 2,500 PCs left on in any one evening, translating into extra electricity usage costing £175,000 per year.

Computers left on in standby mode save little energy, with a power usage of 70 per cent of their maximum, PC supplier Fujitsu Siemens estimates.

Software supplier 1E has created an online tool and game to calculate business electricity usage.

Richard Thurston writes for ZDNet UK