Oxy Computers: An Easy, Painless Fix

According to a UEPI report, nearly 9000 metric tons of CO2 is created each year by Occidental's electrical use alone. This accounts for nearly 3/4ths of school's entire carbon footprint and drawfs the CO2 produced by staff and student commutes and natural gas usage. Though solar panels and carbon offsets are a necessary part of the solution, Oxy must take steps to reduce the amount of energy consumed on campus. Even if the school produced 100% of its own energy, it could still reduce it's environmental impact, perhaps even turning a profit should the day come in which production outpaced demand for electricity.

Of course, training the thousands of students, faculty, and staff of Oxy to reduce their energy consumption is not easy, and should treated as a long-term solution. However, there are simple, cost-effective, and relatively painless ways Oxy can immediately cut its energy consumption with almost no sacrifice made on the part of students.

Occidental currently has hundreds of desktop computers in dorms, the library, and other academic buildings. The vast majority of these computers run on Windows XP, an operating system whose default power settings are less than green. All XP computers are set to run on "Home/Office Desk" setting, which leaves monitors lit for 20 minutes, hard disks running for an hour, and never puts the system into a standby mode. These computers, especially the ones in dorms and libraries, run for most the day and rarely, if ever, shut down.

It is probably not reasonable to lead a campaign encouraging students to turn off a computer every time they are done using it. Students trickle in and out of the labs all day and few would be willing to wait the entire time to start up and shut down a computer. But Oxy could make significant energy savings by adjusting some of the power settings. Changing the setting to "Laptop" would darken monitors in 10 minutes and allow hard disks to shut down in just a half-hour. There are also various ways to manually adjust each power setting so the maximum amount of energy can be saved without sacrificing students' time.

These type of simple, painless, fixes are the type of changes Oxy needs to institute if it is serious about cutting back its contribution to global warming. If anyone is interested in taking this idea to ITS, or another department that might be helpful, please let me know.