Please don't print pages from this website unless you really need to
The Implications of Energy Star 5.0
Written by Peter Hopton
In the EU, rule 106/2008 states that Energy Star for Desktop PC’s is to be used as a minimum efficiency measure for all public sector procurement. This means that machines don’t have to be registered, but should be more efficient than the standard to be procured with public money.
Energy Star is a standard that concentrates on energy efficiency of products, which represents around 80% of the carbon footprint of most IT equipment. Saving energy is probably the most important criteria to be used for buying equipment, as it has a large global warming impact and can result in total cost of ownership savings. Energy Star is a joint EU/US standard administered by the US environmental protection agency, Energy Star’s aim is the certify the most efficient 25% of equipment.
Energy Star is reviewed regularly and involves intensive market consultation prior to the adoption of the next revision of a standard. On Desktops, they’re currently between standards, the new Energy Star 5.0 standard coming into effect for all equipment made after 1st July 2009. Energy Star 4.0, the previous standard is now viewed as quite relaxed; Energy Star 5.0 equipment uses 30%+ less energy.
With the impending effective date of energy star 5.0 on July 1st public sector buyers should consider their existing product standardisation and contracts for compliance with 106/2008. This date is right in the middle of the educational buying season and could leave a number of institutions short of compliance with the standard.
Energy Star 5.0 splits equipment into 4 categories; A, B , C and D. In short these categories represent Single, Dual, Triple and Quad Core systems respectively. The Energy Star 5 standard revolves around a metric called TEC – an estimate of how much electricity you’re going to use a year, in KWh. TEC assumes your machine is off 55% of the time, on 40% of the time and asleep 5% of the time. To pass Energy Star 5 for a category B (dual core) machine, it would need to use less than 175KWh per year.
Energy Star have recently launched a specification for Servers v1.0, which identifies the most efficient server equipment, this specification is scheduled for regulation in the EU around September 2009, where it will become the minimum standard for server procurement.
Ask your suppliers for the TEC of Energy Star Certified desktops, some products on the market exceed the standard by over 60% and can offer great energy savings. For example equipment from eco-computer maker VeryPC (www.very-pc.co.uk) significantly exceeds the standard and TEC numbers are published openly on their website.
