Driving Cost Savings for Customers
Dell is designing next-generation technologies that dramatically reduce energy consumption, drive cost savings and help achieve a low-carbon economy. Green technology for the 21st Century.
We are focused on helping our customers achieve their environmental goals, including lowering CO2 emissions, driving new efficiencies and reducing operating costs. Our Latitude E-Series laptops and OptiPlex desktops prioritize energy efficiency and the reduction or elimination of harmful materials like brominated flame retardant/polyvinyl chloride and mercury.
The energy efficiency of Dell desktops has improved nearly 50 percent since 2005, while laptops have improved 16 percent since 2006. This translates to meaningful savings for millions of customers across the globe.
In September 2008, we announced a plan to transition our notebooks to LED displays within 12 months. LED displays deliver significant energy savings compared to cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) technology, in addition to being mercury free and highly recyclable. We estimate customer savings of approximately $20 million and 220 million kilowatt-hours in 2010 and 2011 combined, the equivalent of annual CO2 emissions resulting from energy use of more than 10,000 homes.
While we’re proud of the progress we’re making, we recognize that our work has only started. Now more than ever, we’re focused on partnering with customers, suppliers and employees to drive additional improvements throughout our business, products and supply chain.
We have an opportunity to support our customers’ environmental goals, too. We can help them use energy responsibly through our innovative products and services and save them money in the process.
Evaluation and Optimization of Data Centers
One way we make a difference is through our innovative and holistic approach to evaluating and optimizing data centers.Our approach is to improve the utilization of our customers’ assets so they won’t have to use as much equipment, which saves on space to house the servers and energy to power and cool them. This approach relies on using energy-efficient servers, refreshing the servers every three to four years, using virtualization pervasively and decommissioning unneeded servers. Many customers have old power distribution technology in their data centers. We also look at features such as the types of cooling equipment, containment implementation, data center temperatures and so on.
By evaluating all of these elements together and making improvements in many areas, the results can be dramatic. We took the same approach in our own data centers and saved approximately $38 million in one year — savings that came directly from a drastic reduction in power consumption.