The fact is that if you want to grow your sales, particularly into vertical markets, you need to get up to speed on two key EPA initiatives: ENERGY STAR and EPEAT. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires federal agencies to buy “either ENERGY STAR products or products designated as energy efficient by the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP).” In March of 2007, Executive Order 13423 not only required agencies to implement ENERGY STAR sleep features on PCs and monitors but also only buy EPEAT-registered products. Even if you don’t sell to government agencies, this is still a very big deal. We’ve seen in recent years how businesses, including SMBs, tend to follow guidelines made for vertical markets. Check out the European RoHS initiative as an example. The EPA is encouraging all businesses and consumers to embrace ENERGY STAR and EPEAT, and the pressure is mounting for you to either get in the game or stew on the sidelines.

ENERGY STAR
The EPA first launched its ENERGY STAR program in 1992, and the organization estimates that in 2007 alone the effort saved U.S. businesses and individuals about $16 billion in energy costs. “If all computers sold in the United States meet the ENERGY STAR requirements,” notes the organization on its site, “the savings in energy costs will grow to about $2 billion each year and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by the equivalent of those from 2 million cars.” The preconception that environmentally friendlier PCs are inherently more expensive than regular PCs simply doesn’t add up. Sure, if you pick 80 PLUS Silver power supplies and Xeon processors expressly designated as low voltage, there will be a price premium. You don’t get something for nothing. But when we look at what defines a mainstream system, not the cheapest possible budget box (that’s more likely to result in higher service/replacement costs anyway), going ENERGY STAR doesn’t cost much more. Additionally, the EPA estimates that an ENERGY STAR-compliant desktop will save its owner $15 annually versus a non-ENERGY STAR system.

What exactly qualifies a PC for ENERGY STAR? Ultimately, for today’s Tier 1 requirements, it boils down to power supply efficiency sustained power draw in the standby (off), sleep, and idle modes. The Tier 1 specifications went into effect on July 20, 2007, and mandate that an internal PC power supply have 80% minimum efficiency at 20%, 50% and 100% load levels as well as a power factor of at least 0.9 at 100% rated output. Don’t get too bogged down here. These happen to be the same qualifications needed for basic 80 PLUS certification, and you can see the list of qualifying PSU units at www.80plus.org/manu/psu/psu_join.aspx.

Lenovo EPEAT monitor Tier-one OEMs like Lenovo are increasingly taking care to get environmentally certified and promote their energy savings in their marketing. Savvy system builders would be wise to do the same.

The other side of Tier 1 is operational efficiency. For desktops (including “desktop-derived servers”), standby mode must run at less than or equal to 2.0W. Sleep mode (which excepts desktop-derived servers) must be less than or equal to 4.0W. The tricky part is idle mode, in which the system is fully up but only running background tasks, as when boot-up into the OS completes. A system with a multi-core CPU and a GPU with more than 128MB of non-shared memory (Category C) must idle at or under 95.0W. A desktop with a multi-core CPU and at least 1GB of system memory (Category B) must idle at 65.0W or less. All other desktops (Category A) must slip under 50.0W. The idle qualifications for notebooks are similar, with Category B (GPU with at least 128MB of dedicated memory) coming in at or under 22.0W and all other notebooks (Category A) idling at 14.0W or less. The threshold for a notebook’s sleep state is 1.7W, and standby is 1.0W.

You might notice that none of these specs account for active state power consumption. There’s no distinction for dual-core versus 4- or 8-core processors. These and several other factors are slated to get rolled into a Tier 2 spec due to go into effect in 2009. Also note that these numbers and specs don’t account for the monitor, which is handled separately within the ENERGY STAR program (as are printers, scanners, and all-in-ones). An ENERGY STAR-compliant monitor must consume 1W or less when in off mode, 2W or less in sleep mode, and the maximum allowed draw when active varies according to the screen’s native resolution.

The great thing about ENERGY STAR monitors is that they’re cut and dry. They comply or they don’t, and you can use the EPA’s search tool to start looking for qualified makes and models.


EPEAT
ENERGY STAR compliance is one of 23 required criteria (plus 28 additional optional criteria) that fall under the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) specification, more formally known as the IEEE 1680 standard. As stated in the EPEAT FAQ, this is “a procurement tool to help large volume purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare, and select desktop computers, notebooks, and monitors based on their environmental attributes.” In other words, when an entity like the City of San Francisco wants to send out a bid for new systems, one of the requirements might well be EPEAT compliance.

Be afraid. If you thought ENERGY STAR looked daunting, take a spin through the IEEE 1680 Section 4 summary (www.epeat.net/Docs/Summary%20of%20EPEAT%20Criteria.pdf). Besides ENERGY STAR compliance, your EPEAT systems will need to be RoHS-compliant, declare all postconsumer recycled plastic content, eliminate paints or coatings not compatible with recycling or reuse, be at least 65% reusable/recyclable, be part of your product take-back/recycling service, and produce an annual report as per the Performance Track or Global Reporting Initiative.

If you’re an OEM, even a local OEM, maybe this is doable. But the prospects are grim for smaller shops. These groups might be able to partner with larger resellers or distributors, but there will always be the risk of competing for bids against your partner.

The inconvenient truth is that the EPA, for all its laudable actions and efforts, seems oblivious to the conditions of most system builders—or it’s simply resigned itself to not being able to care. After all, if the green certification processes were entirely self-governed, then any reseller could slap a compliance sticker on his system, and this or that EPA group would be left to mop up the complaint calls from everyone with a $29 watt meter able to disprove the reseller’s claims. Moreover, we’re still left with the problem of changing parts. Back in the days of paranoia over FCC Class B certification, changing out a keyboard, never mind a motherboard or hard drive with a board-level component update, invalidated your system’s approval. We haven’t seen an official statement saying if this is still the case with ENERGY STAR and/or EPEAT, but we wouldn’t bet against it. Unless you have the sort of volume able to lock suppliers into not changing their parts and availability of those parts for at least a year, you’re sunk.

Is Green Rotten?
Not necessarily. If you can procure certified machines from larger partners, there are still plenty of markets receptive to low-energy machines beyond the government and education sectors. EPEAT expressly says it’s designed for large volume procurement. What about small business procurement? What about energy-conscious consumers? Having a bona fide ENERGY STAR/EPEAT option or two to run past these accounts as well as your own “meets ENERGY STAR requirements” systems (meaning they meet the EPA specs even if they don’t have the official paperwork attached) makes a lot of sense.

	Tech Networks Earth-PC Tech Networks of Boston is one of the few channel resellers that has taken the time to get real ENERGY STAR certification and craft a family of products around the green theme. Imagine markets where the object isn’t to have the fastest or cheapest machines, only the most environmentally responsible.

What the channel needs is an eco-badge that conveys the quality and energy efficiency of the EPA’s standards but with requirements that are achievable by any reseller. We’re not holding our breaths for the government to lend a hand, but how about a consortium of the vendors most active in promoting environmental awareness in its products? As of this writing, the top half of Adaptec’s home page is dedicated to “green” and power savings. Practically every solid state drive (SSD) manufacturer now in production is trumpeting the technology’s power savings. At Intel’s recent Channel Alliance Summit, the company handed out a fold-out flier detailing its “Eco-Smart” motherboards. (Check out www.intel.com/go/environment for more on Intel’s involvement in these issues.)

In fact, even if the industry can’t put its heads together, we wouldn’t be surprised if Intel went it alone. Time and time again, Intel has shown that it’s willing to spend untold millions to help keep the channel viable and profitable. We’re sure the company could find way to start an eco-friendly branding campaign that mimicked ENERGY STAR and didn’t invoke the color of its chief competitor. Everybody who’s anybody in PC manufacturing (even AMD through its ATI arm) works with Intel. Now, imagine a drag-and-drop site much like the current YourServerInnovation.com (an off-domain Intel site dedicated to the Xeon universe), where visitors could pick from a stable of known low-power components, compile them into a single configuration, and the tool could spit out a report listing both the components as well as the system’s power specs.

Intel could call it Eco-Smart, whip up stickers for program participants, and even make the tool available only through its partner portal for registered program members. Backed with collateral and a modest branding campaign, it might not be the same as ENERGY STAR, but it would sure be better than the nothing most resellers have today, and it would give system builders something to use as ammunition against the tier-ones able to play the EPA’s game.

Right now, we often hear feedback saying that there’s a lot of interest in green computing, but when it’s time for buyers to rank their priorities, pricing always wins. We would argue that the “green gap” on pricing gets smaller every month while public awareness of energy costs and environmental detriments continues to climb. If nothing else, all of the public sector employees now required to buy green at work still need to come home, armed with all of their EPA messaging, and buy systems for their families. You can’t afford not to be prepared for this trend. Learn about low-power options from your vendors, find out if you can partner your way into ENERGY STAR and/or EPEAT certification, and form a strategy on how to promote your more environmentally conscious offerings.