Imagine keeping your car at full throttle in your driveway to shave a few minutes off your commute. Imagine leaving your auto at full throttle in your employer's parking lot so you could make a quick dash out to run errands at lunch. Or installing a V-8 engine in your small commuter car, even though you rarely travel at speeds greater than 55 mph.

Although we would balk at anything as wasteful as running our car when parked or supping up our small commuter car, many of us without realizing it do something similar at work with our PCs.

Under-utilization of PCs is common in most organizations. Research by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found three primary causes:

1. Most people do not turn-off their computers before leaving on evenings or weekends.
2. Even when in the office, most roles include a significant amount of time attending meetings or other non-computer work.
3. High performance PCs are overkill for most office applications. Checking email and preparing simple office documents barely uses the PC computing capabilities. In general, the more computing power, the more energy the PC will consume.

Different than cars that are equipped with a quick start ignition and a throttle to provide power as needed, PCs are relatively undeveloped. There are, however, PC energy management tools that provide a 40 to 60 percent reduction of energy costs coupled with a 12 month pay-back on the initial investment.

That's what Philippe Charpentier, former Director of Strategy and Innovation for La Poste, found when he started researching potential green projects in late 2009. La Poste is France's deregulated postal service. In addition, La Poste has diversified to become Europe's second largest package delivery service and provider of banking and insurance services to nearly 30 million consumers.

After reviewing IT best practices at over 50 global firms, Charpentier reported, "One of the most attractive projects for La Poste's green portfolio was PC energy management." La Poste manages 180,000 PCs that sat mostly idle, yet still used as much electricity as if they were fully engaged in a difficult computing problem.

After settling on PC energy management as a priority, Charpentier and his team uncovered more than 30 suppliers. His team selected a new player, AVOB (Alternative Vision of Business), with a unique approach to the problem.

"The AVOB solution does what other solutions do by automatically putting the PC into low energy mode when inactive after a specified amount of time," Charpentier explained. "That saved La Poste 50 percent on average. What AVOB does differently is to also automatically adapt power consumption of the PC depending on the task to save an additional 10 to 20 percent on the energy consumed."

Next page: Five tips for successful PC power management