When it comes to fast ways to make a big dent in both your greenhouse gas emissions as well as your energy bill, PC power management is one of the easiest actions your company can make. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most overlooked practices: Forrester recently released a study that found only 13 percent of companies have implemented organization wide power management.

PC power management at its most simple level is activating and managing the sleep settings on your fleet of desktops, laptops and monitors (some power management tools can also be used on other electronics, but for simplicity's sake we'll focus solely on computers).

If your firm hasn't yet started a PC power management project, or if you have and haven't yet seen big savings, then the following 10 tips, in no particular order, will get you on the right track.

1. Screen savers are not power management. Simply setting all your PCs to go to a screen saver overnight won't save you any energy, and may in fact use even more energy than a computer that's simply left on.

2. PC power management can save you big money. Most power management software firms predict $20 to $60 in savings per computer per year from reduced energy use. When you're talking about a large enterprise, that can add up very quickly. AT&T, for example, launched a PC power management project in 2008 that will save the company more than $13 million a year from installing 1E's NightWatchman software on 310,000 computers.

3. Installing a power management system can be free. Although it sounds too good to be true, there are a number of rebate programs available -- mostly through utility companies -- that will earn you a set amount of money for each PC you install power management software on. A good example is Pacific Gas & Electric's $15 rebate per computer, an amount that essentially offsets the initial cost of the purchase, and means an ROI of zero days. More information about PG&E's rebate is in this PDF brochure, and you can also search on the Department of Energy's DSIRE database for utility programs. A summary of links is here: http://tinyurl.com/GreenBiz-Power-Mgmt-Rebates.

4. PC power management starts saving money right away. In addition to being a zero-cost endeavor, power management also has immediate impacts. Companies can install most systems in a matter of hours, and you'll see reductions right away in your energy use.

5. There are many different vendors, but the tools are all similar. The Energy Star website lists 18 different PC power management solutions, and there are many more on the market than that. While it can be overwhelming to try and make a decision, there's a simple fact to remember. "At the core capability, they all do the same thing," according to Marc Brungardt, the executive vice president of operations at Promisec. "These companies didn’t invent the opportunity, it is an inherent part of the computer operating system." There are of course differentiations between all of these systems, but you can't go wrong with almost any solution. Let the savings drive your decision by asking your local utility which programs it will give you refunds for implementing.