NOTE: This page is not being updated at this time. The last update was on October 18, 2006.

• EPA Energy Star links
• Companies with products related to power management
• University projects on power management and energy conservation
• Institutes and conferences related to IT energy conservation
• Standards and initiatives
• Existing technologies
• Emerging technologies
• Articles related to the Huber and Mills Fortune magazine article
• Popular press articles
• Abstracts of related proposals funded by the NSF
• Miscellaneous

1. Energy Star program at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The website says, "ENERGY STAR is a government-backed program helping businesses and individuals protect the environment through superior energy efficiency."

2. Energy Star for Computers specifies energy savings for computers. The website says, "An ENERGY STAR qualified computer uses 70% less electricity than computers without enabled power management features."

3. EPA Energy Star: Key Product Criteria for Computers and Monitors specifies power consumption standards for desktop and notebook computers. Equipment purchased by the US government must adhere to this standard.

4. EPA Energy Star specification for computer is under revision. This is a call for comments

1. Verdiem Corporation has developed a centralized approach to control power management settings in corporate PCs. Their Surveyor project both controls power management settings and measures actual and potential power savings in terms of dollar cost.

2. 1e Limited has developed the SMSWake-up product to wake-up PCs at night for software updates. Their Night Watchman product can be used to centrally close applications to enable nighttime shutdown of PCs.

3. Absolute Dynamics has developed the rmSHUTDOWN product to remotely shutdown/reboot and wake-up groups of PCs on a given schedule.

4. WattSavvy by Blue Owl Technologies is a software product that evaluates the power management settings and capabilities of the computer it is installed on. It monitors the state of the computer over a time period and displays a chart showing the results.

5. AutoShutdown by Barefoot Productions Inc is a program that when installed in a desktop computer, automatically shuts it down at a predetermined time. The computer is therefore not powered on when unattended and reduces the electricity consumption.

1. Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is an interdisciplinary program that tackles environmental issues.

2. Milly Watt project at Duke University focuses on developing frameworks that allow applications to cooperate with the operating system in optimizing the energy use of the device.

3. PARTS [Power Aware Real-Time Systems] at University of Pittsburgh tackles the goal of minimizing power consumption while defining and meeting deadlines. This project also focuses on new methods for evaluating power-aware architectures and policies.

4. DARK Lab at Rutgers University focuses on reducing the power consumption of large clusters by scheduling the demand for resources in the cluster to optimize the idle time of the components. Components that are idle can be placed in low-power consumption mode, hence saving energy.

5. PERFD at the Delft University of Technology is a program aimed at developing a new power management architecture where applications and devices are able to exchange resource availability and resource requirement information with the aim of optimizing energy consumption.

6. Morph: Morphable Computer Architectures for Highly Energy-Aware Systems project from Notre-Dame is "Adding an Energy Gear to High Performance Embedded Systems."

1. The Environment and the Information Economy was a workshop held Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on March 15-16, 2004. Several of the presentations relate directly or indirectly to the need for, and goals of, Green TCP/IP.

2. IT and Environment Initiative is an initiative of the United Nations University in Japan.

3. Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energyis commited to application-oriented sustainability research.

1. ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is a standard for OS-directed power management and device configuration architecture. Most new desktop computers support this standard to some extent.

2. Network devices class specification by Microsoft and AMD defines the behavior of network devices with respect to power management. This specification is compatible with ACPI Revision 2.0.

3. PCI Bus Power Management Interface Specification Rev 1.2 by PCI the Special Interest Group adds standardized power management capabilities to the PCI specification. These additions are compatible with the ACPI standard.

4. EPA Energy Star: Key Product Criteria for Computers and Monitors specifies power consumption standards for desktop and notebook computers. Equipment purchased by the US government must adhere to this standard.

5. European Eco-label standard for personal computers specifies environment-friendly standards including reduced power consumption for desktop computers.

6. IEEE Power Control Standard for Office and Consumer Electronics is a standards effort for terminology and icons related to device power control.

7. ADSL2 is the next generation broadband DSL standard (link is to white paper by Aware). Low power modes are supported so that energy consumption can be reduced when data traffic over the ADSL2 link is low. ITU standards G.992.3, G.992.4 and G. 992.5 address ADSL2.

8. The EU Stand-by Initiative is a program undertaken by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre to improve the energy efficiency of electrical equipment while either OFF or in a low power consumption stand-by state. Codes of conduct that mandate maximum power consumption when in stand-by states have been passed for digital TV equipment, broadband communications equipment and for external power supplies.

1. AMD Magic Packet is another name for Wake-on-LAN (WOL). This site has a good description of how WOL works.

2. Intel's PRO network interface cards are ACPI compatible and support system wake-up through WOL and/or directed packet.

3. Microsoft Windows has built-in ACPI based support for system configuration and device power management.

4. Intel's Instantly Available technology aims to significantly reduce the power-up and power-down time for PCs.

5. NVIDA PowerMizer Mobile Technology aims to reduce the power consumption of graphics processing units by varying the processing power depending upon the user's requirements.

6. ATI PowerPlay technology varies the core voltage, clock frequency and LCD display refresh rate of the ATI mobile computer graphics processing units depending upon user activity.

7. AMD PowerNow! Technology varies the processor voltage and clock frequency of AMD Mobile Athlon processors dynamically in response to requirements in order to increase battery life and provide high performance.

8. Transmeta Crusoe is a x86 compatible processor that uses a highly efficient low power VLIW core and a software layer that converts x86 instructions to native VLIW instructions. The VLIW core can change core voltage and clock frequency to vary processing power in response to user demand.

9. Intel PXA family of processors is optimized for low power mobile applications such as PDAs and cell phones. These highly integrated chips provide several levels of low power states and feature dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.

10. The Intel 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller is designed for low-power consumption designs. It automatically reduces the Ethernet link speed to 100MBps when operating on battery power and powers down chip components when no network is detected.

1. MRAM technology as developed by IBM is a non-volatile replacement for conventional static RAM. PCs using MRAM could transit to sleep states without first saving the data in RAM to hard disk.

2. NRAM technology as developed by Nantero is a high density non-volatile replacement for conventional RAM that uses nanotechnology.

1. Dig more coal - the PCs are coming by Peter Huber and Mark Mills from Forbes Magazine is a controversial article that claims that IT related energy consumption is currently 13% of total US demand.

2. Debunking an Urban Legend; How Much Electricity Does the Internet Use? by Jonathan G. Koomey counters the arguments contained in the Forbes article by Peter Huber and Mark Mills.

3. Sorry, Wrong Number; How to separate fact from fiction in the Information Age by Jonathan Koomey: examines and counters myths about rate of growth of the Internet and its energy consumption.

4. Rebuttal to Mark Mills's testimony on 'Kyoto and the Internet: The Energy Implications of the Digital Economy' by Jonathan G. Koomey: counters the testimony given by Mark Mills at the Congressional hearings on Kyoto and the Internet.

5. The Computer and the Dynamo by Brian Hayes, American Scientist Vol. 89, No. 5, pp. 390-394, September-October 2001. An overview of the Huber-Mills and Koomey debate in a scholarly journal. Apparentley very well researched.

6. Silicon and Electrons by Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills. A discourse on the energy consumption of digital technology and the impact upon the overall energy consumption of the USA. The authors contend that even as the energy efficiency of an individual device is being improved, the greater numbers being deployed results in increasing overall energy consumption. The authors refer to several studies of office building energy consumption, etc and contend that their claim [article available here] that IT related energy consumption is 13% of overall US energy consumption.

1. Desktop Energy Users Add to Energy Bills by Michael Thelander from Energy User News examines the accumulated effect of millions of PCs on the power grid and discusses past and future solutions.

2. Emerging Technology: Energy Consumption And The New Economy by Jonathan Angel from Network Magazine discusses the effect the Internet has had on power consumption and generation.

3. Internet Data Centers and Electricity Growth By Thomas Grahame and David Kathan from Broadband Wireless Online examines the impact of data centers on the power grid. Part 2 of this article is available here.

4. New Architecture Needed by John C. Dvorak from PC Magazine describes the need for instantly on architectures.

5. The Instant-On Computer By John C. Dvorak: from PC Magazine describes designs for instantly on architectures.

6. Moore's Second Law By Michael S. Malone: from Wired Magazine describes the need for increasing the overall efficiency of electronic systems in order to reduce the energy consumption of next generation devices.

7. Up All Night By John Goff: from CFO Magazine describes in general terms the cost to enterprises caused by PCs operating 24h/day and describes how deploying Verdiem's Surveyor software can help.

8. Why you shouldn't turn off your PC by Brian Cooley of ZDNET Anchor Desk is interesting reading. Leaving a desktop computer on 24/7 - "That's how the pros run machines after all." is a stated argument for leaving desktop computers on all the time.

9. Writing an end to the bio of BIOS by John Spooner of CNET describes EFI [Extensible Firmware Interface], the next generation replacement for the BIOS that could enable computers to bootup faster.

10. My digital home's dirty little secrets by David Carnoy of CNET describes his efforts to create a "digital home" with extensive networking and multimedia capabilities. However, all this equipment running 24/7 results in a significant increase in his monthly electricity bill.

11. Intel® Low-Power Technologies Can Extend Battery Life and Improve Device Usability in Technology@Intel Magazine describes new power management techniques being developed at Intel to optimize the usability of next-generation mobile computing and communications devices.

12. Copper Tops 10 Gigabits by Matt Hamblen of ComputerWorld describes the two standards being developed for transmitting 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper cables and also describes the likely uses.

13. ADSL2 Helps Slash Power in Broadband Designs by Marcos Tzannes of CommsDesign discusses the power management features in the upcoming ADSL2 standard for boradband connections. ADSL2 supports a reduced power, reduced data rate mode (L2) and a low power, no data transmission mode (L3) and a full power, maximum data rate mode (L0).

1. Pulsar: A Cross-Layer Approach to Energy Conservation in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Investigates a multi-layer approach to minimizing energy consumption in wireless networks. Identifies the relationships between the layers and between nodes and attempts to optimize global energy consumption.

2. Infrastructure for Power-Aware Server Clusters (Rutgers) Investigates strategies for conserving power in server clusters without a significant performance penalty by using blade servers. Also investigates power efficient distributed processing for sensor networks.

3. Energy Prediction and Conservation for Server Clusters (Rutgers) Investigates techniques for predicting and optimizing power consumption for server clusters without excessively degrading performance.

4. Energy and Thermal Management for Data Centers (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Investigates energy and thermal management methods for data centers. Focuses on the back-end data storage networks with the aim of producing energy efficient management schemes.

5. NeTS-NR: Strategies to Save Energy in the Internet (Portland State University investigates power management methods for LAN switches.

6. CAREER: High-Performance, Power-Aware, Distributed Computing (University of South Carolina) investiages power consumption of super computers and ways to reduce energy use by workload profiling and modeling.

1. www.internet.co2 is a presentation by Stefan Thomas and Claus Barthel of the Wupertal Institute. This presentation addresses electricity usage of the Internet in Germany.

2. "PowerBack" solution for reducing energy costs of data centers describes a solution for powering down and powering up servers in a data center as the work load on the servers fluctuate.

3. Ethernut is an embedded Ethernet device with development kit. This device can be useful in prototyping new ideas in NIC functionality.

4. Bibliography on power management related publications maintained at the Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

5. Linux Ecology-HOWTO discusses how features in Linux can be used to reduce power consumption and how to reduce waste by using older PC components for a longer time.

6. AT&T's Environmental Health and Safety Website describes and showcases the reserach and technological efforts taken to improve the environment.

7. Energy Awareness - "Power is a critical, limited, and shared system resource” by Niels Fallenbeck and Christoph Scheid summarizes and describes some recent advances towards conserving energy in PC hardware.

8. Energy Star™ at 12: The U.S. IT Perspective [PPT] by Ken Salaets of Information Technology Industry Council describes how US and international industries have successfully adopted the Energy Star standards and the factors that lead to the success of this government/industry partnership.

9. What an Energy-Efficient Computer Can Do by Amory B. Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute studies possible savings in direct energy costs, in air conditioning costs, in office building infrastructure costs, utility investments and possible reductions in environmental pollutants achievable by the deployment of energy efficient PCs and by enabling PC power management capabilities. Though this article dates from 1993, many of the ideas and opportunities explored here are not yet fully taken advantage of.

10. Making the world (of communications) a different place by David D. Clark, et al, considers and identifies long term research challanges in the area of computer networks and communications. This report is the outcome of discussions held within the End-to-End Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force. Reducing the energy consumed for communications and minimizing the energy cost per bit of data trasferred is identified as a major research goal.

11. Energy optimizations in new generation wide area metro networks are discussed in this presentation by the The European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association. The recommedations include introducing low power, low traffic modes in network links, fresh air cooling only at switching stations (no air conditioning units) and the expected date of deployment is 2007.