Device Switching on Demand - A Standby Reducing System

Standby- and idle mode operations of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) consume around 22 billion kWh of energy every year in Germany [1] causing at least 4 billion Euros of economical losses [2] and burdening the climate with greenhouse gas emissions. IT-Designers, Fraunhofer IZM and other partners therefore develop a new system that completely disconnects and reconnects network-EEE to the power grid on demand. In principle, the printing job sent from a computer to a network printer would connect the printer to the power grid and completely disconnect it after the printing job is done. Rules can be defined for each device to achieve a tradeoff between availability, performance and energy consumption. The switching technology is based on a network switch with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) functionality and SBØ-logic. Each EEE in the network must have an additional specific switch. This switch can be installed externally for network EEE that is already on the market. For EEE in development, a miniaturized version of such a switch will be developed which can be integrated by EEE manufacturers into their products. The SBØ-system itself does not consume energy if it is not in switching operation. The SBØ-system can be used to control all network-EEE with an Ethernet connection. In more advanced technical development stages, the SBØ-system can be expanded to control other EEE without ethernetconnections integrating available or planned standby-blocker-systems on the market.