On my way in to work the other day, I caught an NPR story, Utility’s ‘Voltage Reduction’ Plan Saves Energy, about how a Washington state public utility is using “conservation voltage reduction” to save energy, and light bulbs. The electric company monitors the amount of voltage they send to customers (the amount of electrical “water pressure” through the “pipes”). In the U.S., they are supposed to send 120 volts +/-5%, which is 114 volts to 126 volts. The way most power companies currently send out power causes the first half mile radius of customers get 125 volts, and then customers in a mile radius get 124 volts, and so on, so they send out more power than they need to ensure the furthest out customers get output that meets the regulation even after reductions due to distance. However, by regulating precisely, they can reduce the initial power send-out to 117 volt, a cut of 2.5%, which buys the average customer 450 kw, and saves the company $3.5 million per year. Now, if you get down to 111 to 112 volts, there’s the risk of damage to appliances, but apparently a sophisticated monitoring system can prevent that type of drop. A voltage regulation startup Microplanet lets power companies use electronic voltage regulators to precisely regulate voltage and deliver more precise electrical “water pressure.” Now that is a great application of precision monitoring technology.
If you’re inclined to take monitoring of electricity usage into your own hands, there’s the nifty “Kill-A-Watt” electrical usage meter. Using a similar device in Australia, a boingboing.net reader found that his computers were surprisingly inexpensive to run, but he now turns off the whole TV-DVD-VCR stack every night, and makes sure the coffee machine is only turned on while it’s making coffee.
This monitoring of electrical power leads me to believe that precisely monitoring server behavior should allow you to make small incremental changes in server behavior that can save time, power, or resources such as disk space. How about closely monitoring application that require a lot of heavy-duty processing power and finding ways to virtualize those servers? You maintain one piece of hardware but have multiple applications running in virtual environments. That’s all I could come up with for now, but there have to be other examples. I do know that making sure all your monitors have a power save mode and use it can definitely cut back on electricity costs. What other ideas do you have for saving money by monitoring?