Ele ctricity Use d by Office Equipment and Netw ork Equipment in the U.S.

Abstract

In spite of the recent explosive growth in use of office equipment and network equipment, there has been no recent study that estimates in detail how much electricity is consumed by that equipment in the United States. In this study, we examined energy use by office equipment and network equipment at the end of 1999. We classified office equipment into 11 types; for each type we estimated annual energy consumption for residential, commercial and industrial use by combining estimates of stock, power requirements, usage, and saturation of power management. We also classified network equipment into 6 types, and estimated the annual energy consumption for each type. We found that total power use by office equipment and network equipment is about 74 TWh per year, which is about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S. More than 70% of this energy use is dedicated to office equipment for commercial use. We also found that power management currently saves 23 TWh/year, and complete saturation and proper functioning of power management would achieve additional savings of 17 TWh/year. Furthermore, complete saturation of night shut-down for equipment not required to operate at night would reduce power use by an additional 7 TWh/year. Finally, we compared our current estimate with our forecast in 1995. We found that the total difference between our current estimate and the previous forecast is less than 15%. We also identified the factors which led to inaccuracies in the previous forecast.