The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is asking organizations to join the Energy Star Low Carbon IT Campaign. By enabling the power management, or sleep mode, on their computers and monitors, organizations will help reduce our growing demand for electricity, and save money while fighting climate change.

If all office computers and monitors in the United States were set to sleep when not being used, the country could save more than 44 billion kWh or $4 billion worth of electricity and avoid the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of about 5 million cars each year.  Here are answers to common questions:

Do I need to activate power management features if my screen saver is activated?  Screen savers generally do not save energy. In fact, certain graphics-intensive screen savers can cause the computer to burn twice as much energy, and may actually prevent a computer from entering sleep mode.

What is the difference between "system standby" and "hibernate"?  The main difference is that "system hibernate" takes a little longer to wake up, but saves work in the event of power loss.  Both modes drop monitor and computer power use down to 1–3 watts each and saves $25–75 per PC annually.

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