Slimming down PC power costs

Munich, Germany -- The electricity consumption costs of computers may sound like peanuts to some, but for companies with several hundred employees the kilowatt-hours can soon mount up to a huge electricity bill. This has led researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany, to investigate the extent to which ‘thin clients’ can save energy and reduce costs.

Thin clients -- slimmed down computers that are used solely for the input and output of data -- consume up to 50% less electricity as their functions are limited to those of the mouse, the keyboard and the screen.

Data accessed by the users of thin clients are stored on a central server along with most of the operating system. Any new program or update installed on the server, the software automatically runs on all the thin clients that can access the server, so the system requires very little maintenance.

The Fraunhofer study covered the manufacturing, utilisation and disposal phases of conventional PCs and their slim cousins, on behalf of the manufacturer IGEL Technology GmbH.

“Energy consumption when in operation was up to 50% lower than for conventional PCs,” said Dr.-Ing. Hartmut Pflaum. “While PCs consume about 85 watts on average, thin clients including their server get by with 40 to 50 watts. In view of climate change and the need to reduce CO2 emissions, this is an important factor.”

Thin clients devices made by IGEL that were investigated in the study weigh only one third as much as a PC and take up between 11-20% of the space. As both types of device are largely produced in Asia, they need to be small enough to fit neatly into containers, with no waste of space, for cost-efficient transport across the ocean.

Taking into account the size of the server as well, an ‘IGEL’ weighs only 35-40% as much as a PC and is only 18-30% as large – even when only 20 users share a server. “This means that at least three times as many thin clients can be transported in a standard shipping container,” says Pflaum.