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When most IT professionals think about reducing energy consumption, they pay attention to the data center, which after all is filled with power-hungry heat-generating servers. According to a Gartner report released in September, however, the real culprit when it comes to IT's carbon-emission footprint resides not in the data center but on every employee's desk: the PC.

Authored by Rakesh Kumar and Lars Mieritz, the Gartner study measured carbon emissions from a variety of IT devices and found that the top three are PCs/monitors, data centers, and fixed-line telecommunications systems, in that order. PCs and monitors alone contribute 40% of total carbon emissions, data centers around 23%.

In fact, PCs worldwide consume about 80 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. What's more, as much as two-thirds of that is wasted, according to Kevin Klustner, CEO of Verdiem, an IT energy monitoring and management company, translating to $5.4 billion of energy waste each year.

Founded in 2001, Verdiem is based on a very simple premise: Turn off those PCs when not in use and companies will realize millions in power savings, not to mention reducing the organization's overall contribution to global climate change. Backed by venture funds The Phoenix Partners and Kleiner Perkins, Verdiem focused for the first few years of its existence on the public sector, where political pressure and budget cuts made monitoring and reducing power consumption a major goal.

"We save the Baltimore school district $325,000 a year," said Klustner. "For a public school district, that's a lot of money."

As of this year, however, more and more of Verdiem's business is coming from corporations of the Fortune 1,000 sort -- the company's average customer has 3,500 PCs, and that number is growing. VP of business development Dave Harvey estimates that the percentage of incoming online contacts from IT departments has gone from less than one-fifth to about 65% this year.

"We've seen a dramatic increase in corporate interest in the sustainability movement in general," said Klustner.

The reasons are not hard to fathom: Not only are corporations finding that going green pays PR dividends, but Verdiem's Surveyor software boasts tangible financial returns as well. Klustner estimates that savings on power total between $20 and $60 per PC per year, depending on electricity rates and the type of hardware and software running. (Financial service firms, for instance, use powerful machines often with multiple monitors, so the savings are higher.) Surveyor costs $25 for a one-time license fee per PC plus 20% maintenance annually.

What it does is simple: Surveyor turns off or shifts to a low-power setting PCs that are not in use, centrally and remotely. IT managers can choose a specific time (say, 6 p.m.) to power down machines, or base the transition on usage patterns -- the software can tell when a keyboard has not been used for a certain period of time. Getting that accomplished over a corporate network -- plus automated tasks such as waking machines to install patches at night -- is less straightforward.

"It sounds like an easy problem to solve," said Klustner, "but there's a lot of iceberg below the surface when you're working in the corporate world."

Verdiem currently has around 150 customers running about 500,000 PCs. Powering down those machines when not in use will save around 100 million kilowatt-hours this year, preventing more than 61,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. And beyond the desktop, Klustner sees plenty more opportunity for energy savings.

"There's clearly a role for us to play in the data center as well," he said.

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