By Dell Inc.
It’s easy to see why energy efficiency can translate into cost savings: use less energy, spend less on the electric bill. But energy efficiency is more than that. From lower capital and operating costs to reduced risks or even increased opportunities for innovation, energy efficiency gives you the opportunity to do more while using less power.
When it comes to technology, energy efficiency is important regardless of whether you’re looking at personal use or an enterprise data center. In this video, John Pflueger, principal environmental strategist at Dell, talks about how the company has a long-term, strategic focus on driving efficiency across its product offerings.
Dell has an ambitious goal to reduce the energy intensity (a measure of how much work can be done for a given amount of energy) of its product portfolio by 80 percent by 2020. Since launching the goal as part of its Legacy of Good Plan in 2013, the company has reduced overall energy intensity by 30.1 percent (see graphic below). Gains for individual products and product lines are even more impressive: energy intensity of PowerEdge servers has been reduced by 65 percent over the last three generations.
The results are yielding impressive savings, too. The collective purchases in FY15 will use approximately US $450 million less in electricity over their lifetimes compared to the purchases of FY12.
But what about those other opportunities?
Reduced energy intensity also means you can have a longer battery life, which may mean the difference between video chatting with your kids during a flight delay or wandering around the airport hoping to find a free plug.
Or it may mean you have a product that is efficient enough to run in a lower-power environment. For instance, Dell’s giving team deploys Dell Wyse thin clients in a solar-powered Dell Learning Labs c in communities where electricity is unreliable. These classrooms allow children an opportunity to work with technology during the day, and the efficient solar arrays and battery storage allow the rest of the community to take advantage of the labs in the evening. These same low-power solutions have obvious parallel uses after a disaster or in other situations where electricity is at a premium.
For the IT manager, it may mean having enough power capacity to expand a data center rather than building a new one. And that’s not just saving on the costs of electricity – that’s avoiding the cost of significant capital expenditures associated with a new facility. That then frees the funds for other uses.
As Pflueger points out, for the sub-set of companies for whom data centers function like a factory, their energy use goes right into the cost of goods sold. Here he explains why energy efficiency is so important to those customers.
Ultimately, regardless of what kind of user you are, Dell’s goal to reduce energy intensity will help you get more out of your technology while using less power. To learn more about the company’s goal to reduce energy intensity of its products by 80 percent by 2020 or other corporate sustainability goals, visit www.dell.com/legacyofgoodupdate.