Government

Case Study

Scenario: A regional ESCO sought a partner to work with a medium-sized municipality on their energy performance contract. The municipality had several hundred computers spread across many departments and six buildings. The City Manager and the Facilities Director were enthusiastic about using PC power management software to eliminate computer-related energy waste, but the IT Director was skeptical.

Evaluation: The evaluation of one of CTP’s computer software management software solutions was critical as it had to prove both that there was a viable savings opportunity and that the implementation and administration of the software wouldn’t be onerous for the staff. IT had concerns about security, data management and the required effort. The CTP technical team worked with city’s team to show them how the software would interact with their computers securely and non-invasively. Further, they learned how software could help them manage desktops on a daily basis by allowing them to reliably wake computers for virus-scans and software updates after-hours. The city was also shown how to use the software to perform routine computer maintenance functions, such as disc defragmentation, during power-state transitions. The evaluation process showed the potential for the city to save 202 kWh per computer annually.

Results: The city moved forward with the inclusion of the software in their overall energy reduction project. The installation required about 7 hours of IT time over the course of 7 weeks. The ESCO representative’s quote after installation was, “Once we got passed convincing the head IT guy to be on board with this project it went very smooth. That is probably the biggest key is making sure we have buy in from the head powers; it slipped by me that he wasn’t sold on it yet. Setting up meetings with you guys was easy and providing support documentation for where the savings numbers came from was helpful. I appreciate you staying on top of things. I will definitely work with CTP again.”