IT Devices and Energy Consumption

The need for energy conservation has been topical for many years and has gained importance with global warming scenarios and the increasing cost of energy. This paper examines energy consumption of common home IT devices such as routers, voice boxes, PCs and printers with respect to minimising standby power. Another problem of concern in energy usage as related to IT activity is the increasing electrical power consumption levels of data centres, along with data centre cooling problems and the attempts to enhance their energy efficiency. These scenarios illustrate small amounts of energy consumption used by vast numbers of device compared with relatively much smaller number of data centres using large numbers of devices can both result in large energy usage. These scenarios further areas where there is a trend to increased energy consumption of IT devices in the 21st century and where it is possible to reduce this trend.