Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — If you feel a pang of guilt whenever you see one of those public-service commercials urging you to replace your prehistoric incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents, your idling computer should make you downright remorseful.

A desktop PC with its cooling fans and whirring disk drives uses enough power to light up to three 100-watt bulbs, more if you count the monitor.

With North American homes averaging two or more computers each, that adds up to a lot of electricity, a lot of greenhouse gas-producing power generation even when they’re not being used.

The information-technology sector has started waking up to the fact it gobbles energy at prodigious rates, says Jeff Omelchuk, managing director of the Portland, Ore.-based Green Electronics Council.

“Just in the last less than year or so there seems to be just an explosion of people’s recognition of the power consumption of the IT infrastructure,” says Omelchuk.

Among the biggest power users are the sprawling server farms that underpin the Internet and corporate data centres, he says.

But the millions of home computers also leave a sizable carbon footprint even when their power-conserving features are enabled.

“In general, a large desktop gaming system that is optimized for video display and fast-processing and a lot of memory generally uses much higher power levels, and laptops in general use less power,” says Omelchuk.

It’s one reason Omelchuk is intrigued by the Zonbu, a basic computer that sells for US$99 and uses as little as nine watts of power, enough to run a couple of nightlights.

“From an environmental perspective it’s an excellent way to go,” says Omelchuk, whose organization operates EPEAT, which rates IT hardware for its overall Earth-friendliness.

EPEAT — which stands for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (epeat.net) and is used by an increasing number of U.S. and Canadian government agencies as a purchasing guideline — gave the Zonbu a gold star rating for its low power consumption and overall design.

Zonbu, the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Gregoire Gentil and partner Alain Rossman, does away with most of a computer’s power-hungry hardware.

Using a Linux-based operating system, its suite of commonly used applications such as web-browsing, word processing and multimedia, lives on a four-gigabyte CompactFlash card like the ones used in digital cameras.

But user data is stored on servers the company leases from Amazon.com. Zonbu owners pay a monthly subscription fee based on the amount of storage they rent, up to 100 gigabytes.

The units went on sale in July and are marketed in North America through Zonbu.com.

The system is similar in concept to so-called “thin-client” computers used in many businesses for more than a decade but which never caught on with home PC users.

Gentil says they failed because it took too long to load applications from the central server — something Zonbu avoids by having the applications reside on the flash memory card.

The advent of broadband Internet capability, open-source Linux operating system and a Taiwanese-sourced VIA processor optimized for low-power use opened the door for Zonbu, which Gentil calls a “concierge PC.”

“This is really a fully managed PC that we want to offer to the customer for this monthly fee, meaning that the user has nothing to install, nothing to set up, nothing to configure, nothing to upgrade. We take care of everything.”

Zonbu’s reviews so far have been generally positive with some reported glitches but a sense it’s a viable tool for everyday computing chores. Some note Zonbu’s central data storage and backup allows users to travel with the unit and work anywhere there’s a high-speed Internet connection.

Making the Zonbu green and hassle-free were equal design goals, says Gentil, who like Omelchuk has spotted a rising consciousness of IT’s environmental impacts.

“There’s still some work to do to explain what are the different benefits of green computers,” Gentil says. “This is the first step.”

EPEAT is just a year old but Omelchuk says its program has already made an impact.

A report the Green Electronics Council issued in June estimates EPEAT-registered products purchased in the last six months of 2006 will save 13.7 billion kilowatts of electricity over their lifespan — enough to power 1.2 million U.S. homes for a year.

They will also reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 1.07 million tonnes, equal to taking 852,000 cars off the road for a year, the report says.

“So if people think that green computers don’t matter, I beg to differ,” says Omelchuk, adding the council is looking to expand the EPEAT program beyond IT to include such things as flat-screen TVs.

“The design of the product makes a huge difference in the product’s lifetime energy consumption.”