The mass replacement of PCs with thin clients could save UK businesses £78m in electricity costs, say experts, and slash C02 emissions by 485,000 tonnes a year.

A study conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute, a private research organisation in Germany, tested how much electricity the client-computing model consumes in comparison to running applications locally on a PC.

“Energy consumption [of thin clients] when in operation was up to 50 per cent lower than for conventional PCs. PCs consume about 85 watts on average, thin clients including their server get by with 40-50 watts.” said researcher Dr. Hartmut Pflaum in a statement.

The measurement was based on three different usage scenarios; light, where the thin client accessed a single instance of Word running on the server; medium which added Outlook; and heavy which included running a CAD application.

Stephen Yeo is worldwide strategic marketing director at Igel Technologies, which supplied the thin clients for the study. He believes the power savings represent a conservative estimate, given that the number of users per server was calculated at only 20 during the test.

“The test took into consideration idle periods, and when the processors were running at 10 per cent, or flat out, for instance. They also factored in the energy being used by the server and data centre air conditioning.” he said.

Though the cost of desktop PCs is falling, thin clients cost as little as £175. Most are suitable for workers that do not need the more powerful processing and storage requirements that desktop PCs provide, though respective application performance and efficiency is more difficult to quantify.

“Can the server based computing argument be justified purely on purchase price? Probably not, but it is more about the security and manageability aspects that thin clients bring,” added Yeo.