Shut it off! HP widget show users impact of power management.

(Updated post on June 4 ... Turns out the widget DOES work on Macs.)

You gotta love Hewlett-Packard. I spent an hour on the phone the other day with some of the company’s imaging team going through some various environmental and eco-tech announcements, and NO ONE mentions that it’s just one of a bunch of other things they are planning to announce. Whatever!

Anyway, I’ll follow up one other item in a couple of days because it begs an interview. But TODAY I figured I’d share a link for a new power management information widget that the company is using to raise awareness about the energy-saving impact of simply turning off your PC at night.

The “Power To Change" widget can be downloaded onto your PC desktop where it will keep tabs on the progress of the campaign as far as power-management behavioral changes.

HP estimates that if 100,000 people were to shut down their computers when they leave at the end of the day, the energy saved would equal 2,680 kilowatt hours. The diverted carbon emissions would be equivalent to taking 105 cars off the road each day. (HP calculates these numbers using information that it has gleaned from data out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the UK Energy Saving Trust and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.) The Power To Change campaign covers three regions, Asia Pacific and Japan; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and the Americas. It actually is available in five languages, as well: Chinese, English, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.