EPA's ENERGY STAR Helps Schools Across the Country Save Millions
As students throughout the nation start the new school year, education leaders are cheering the results of their involvement in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR Low Carbon IT Campaign. Having pledged to power manage over two million computers nationwide, U.S. secondary schools, colleges and universities are on track to save $40 million dollars per school year, the equivalent of planting more than 60,000 trees and preventing 300,000 tons of annual CO2 emissions.
“EPA is excited to see the results of this initiative, as schools across the country show how simple changes can make a huge difference in energy savings and the fight against climate change,” says Ann Bailey, Director of ENERGY STAR Product Labeling. “With assistance from EPA when needed, this can be done at a minimal cost, most often involving no more than some time from Information Technology (IT) personnel. We challenge more schools to make the pledge to power manage their computers, and realize the great opportunities that energy saving can bring to their school community.”
COOL FACT: Since 2012, schools from coast to coast have been taking steps to enable software features that automatically put inactive computers and monitors into a low-power sleep mode, saving up to $50 per computer annually. In prior years, this presented a technological challenge to many schools, since older software applications often undermined low-power capabilities. But with the way software has improved and declining school budgets, the computer power management (CPM) opportunity has attracted over 680 academic institutions, with over two million computers. For local school systems across the country, CPM is a simple process that is leading to a significant pay off.
“Carroll County Public Schools recognizes that the environment is of great interest to our students and community,” says Gary Davis, Carroll County Public Schools (Maryland) Chief Information Officer. “Not only did computer power management demonstrate our commitment to helping the environment, we were able to re-invest the financial savings to our school system's bottom line, helping with the everyday costs of education.”
This success represents only a fraction of the estimated 61,000 schools in the U.S. Many academic institutions may have already taken the initiative on their own, but there are a sizeable number of academic institutions that have not taken advantage of this opportunity, leaving plenty of room for increased savings and carbon reduction. For more information about the ENERGY STAR Low Carbon IT Campaign, check out: www.energystar.gov/lowcarbonit.
More than 1,200 K-12 school districts have also partnered with EPA’s ENERGY STAR program to reduce whole-building energy use across all their buildings. Learn more at www.energystar.gov/buildings.