Dell Plans Green PC Push

Dell said Wednesday that it plans to cut the combined power of its desktop and notebook PCs by 25 percent in 2010, compared to the current power output of those systems today.

Rival Hewlett-Packard said earlier that it plans to reduce the energy consumption of volume desktop and notebook PC families by 25 percent, relative to 2005. Measured against that standard, Dell's reductions would be 62 percent for its desktops, and 37 percent for its laptops, according to Albert Esser, Dell's vice president of power and infrastructure solutions for its Dell Product Group .

"Overall this one thing we really want to be is driving forward to become the greenest tech company on the planet," Esser said.

The power savings are in part required by Energy Star 5.0, with its significantly toughened regulations on power supplies and the like. But Esser said that Dell will continue to work with vendors to throttle power, both in terms of system design and the sourcing of power-optimized components.

"One, we will first continue to integrate Energy Smart technologies into the product," Esser said, referring to a basket of Dell technologies that includes low-power Intel and AMD processors, aggressively power-managed system settings, and management tools. Those will also include circuit design and internal routing, he said.

"Low-flow fan technology is a significant one," Esser added. 'We don't source the cheapest…fans, but often we choose to work with a vendor to create a custom design." Esser cited Dell's internal 1000e rack-mounted platforms as ones that are more efficient at moving air than competitive offerings.

Beyond that, Dell is the first PC manufacturer to include a bronze-level certified power supply from the 80 PLUS organization, which certifies power supplies at 80 percent efficiency or above. Similarly, Dell is working with vendors of memory and hard drives to optimize those components, too.

"Once you have the best components…you thus go in and try with power management and advanced speed curves and load management," Esser added.

Although Dell has yet to call out the power consumption for a given product on its shopping pages, the company does provide a energy calculator to provide some baseline comparisons on how much power certain Optiplex desktops and Latitude notebooks draw, versus the other.

Dell's other green credentials include its corporate headquarters, whose campus is powered with 100 percent 'green' energy, Dell said. The company has already saved more than $1.2 million and avoided 8,200 tons of carbon dioxide through replacing lights and retrofitting air conditioning units throughout central Texas facilities.

Source:pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2305095,00.asp