Step 8D - Lower Environmental Impact

Green, or environmentally responsible, IT operations can be improved by VDI in several areas: energy savings, reduced manufacturing waste and toxins, less energy and materials used in shipping, lower disposal costs and higher levels of recycling.  All of this reduces your carbon footprint as well as both direct and indirect costs. 

A key reduction in both operating costs and environmental impact is the reduced electricity use of VDI endpoints compared to PCs.  This reduced usage comes from two factors:

  1. Reduced direct energy consumption by the desktop endpoints. Typical business desktop PCs consume 115 watts vs. a Pano Zero Client consuming no more than 6.5 watts when active and less than 0.2 watts when in sleep mode. Assuming each is awake for 9 hours per day, this leads to an annual direct energy use of 525 kWh/year for a PC vs. only 62 kWh/year for a Pano Zero Client including energy needed for the portion of the shared server.
  2. Reduced energy for air-conditioning needed to cool the waste heat produced by desktop endpoints. Given a typical air-conditioning efficiency where each watt of heat produced consumes .3 watt for cooling, air-conditioning for a PC will consume another 157 kWh compared to only 19 kWh annually for a Pano Zero Client and the portion of the shared server.

You can calculate the overall energy and financial savings from deploying VDI with the following steps:

  1. calculate the direct energy used by multiplying the watts used for each PC power management state (awake, idle, and sleeping) by the hours in that state to get watt hours per day; convert to kWh by dividing by 1000 and convert to annual usage by multiplying by 365,
  2. do the same direct energy calculations for the VDI endpoint, including the shared portion of the VDI server and storage system,
  3. make the same calculations for AC energy use for the PC and VDI endpoints using the AC Energy Efficiency Ratio (typically 30%, so each 10 watts of direct energy usage creates heat that requires air conditioning that uses 3 watts of added power),
  4. convert the total (direct + AC) energy consumed by the PC and VDI endpoint to an annual value and take the difference between the two values (e.g. 682 kWh per PC vs. 81 kWh per Pano Zero Client) to get the kWh saved annually per PC converted to VDI (e.g. 601 kWh),
  5. multiply the annual savings by the number of PCs being replaced by VDI (e.g. 1,000 VDI desktops = 601,000 kWh saved annually),
  6. multiply total kWh saved annually by your specific electrical rate (per kWh) to get the annual savings from electricity conservation.

Using these calculations for a 1,000 seat deployment and a national average commercial electrical rate of $0.103/kWh results in an annual utility bill savings of $61,9990 or close to $62 annually per PC replaced by VDI. 

Electrical savings may be much higher depending on the systems being replaced and your specific electrical rate. Winthrop & Weinstine estimated energy savings of $10,000 per year for each 100 Pano Systems deployed, while the University of Maryland saw computer lab power consumption reduced by 75%.

You can also take the electricity saved and use it to calculate the reduction in your carbon footprint using a standard CO2 factor of 1.54 lbs of CO2 produced per kWh, resulting in a reduction of 530 tons of CO2 emissions per year or over 1/2 ton less annually for each PC replaced by VDI.

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