Comment Re:But weren't they on anyway? (Score 1) 621
Wait, you really don't believe this? I have a kill-a-watt and can assure you he speaks the truth. I don't have a ridiculously high end computer, but I can get its power consumption to vary by more than 300W between it being idle + LCD's in DPMS power save and me actively pushing the cpu and gpu with something. Putting it into S3 suspend will break off another 50W or so.
Now 10 year old hardware pushing 40W delta between unloaded and loaded not including a CRT going to sleep or something? Doubtful. Maybe 15-20W tops. But then again some of that school district's hardware was much newer and $0.06/kWh is a pretty decent utility rate too. I'd say $1 million is a pretty good round number here even though it probably represents a modest 10-20% increase over the bill were 5000 machines simply left on and idle. But consider if this guy who had enough control to install software on 5000 machines had simply set them to go to S3 after a couple hours of not being used? He could have saved the school district millions on power just as easily as he wasted it.