If specifically asked, users do realise software can use more energy than necessary. In general users are interested in energy efficient software. This is the outcome of research done by the Green IT Consortium region Amsterdam and the Software Improvement Group (SIG).

                  
Most people know implicitly that wrongly developed software leads to more computations than necessary. To know what users have in mind when thinking about software with a small CO2 footprint a survey was held. The complete results of this survey are available: Survey results (PDF - 967 Kb).

The Green Software Awareness Survey was held among 90 people around the world. Both end users and developers were surveyed. Among them were people who were new to the software business (one year experience), and a few highly experienced people (40 year experience). “The first question was answered overwhelmingly positive. We wanted to know if people thought it is possible to redevelop existing software in such a way that it would require less energy than before. 98 percent responded yes to this question.”, says Miguel Ferreira, researcher at SIG.

How much energy savings is possible?
The second question focussed on the possible potential of savings: what are the energy savings of an adaptation of the code? The answers were:

	None		2 %
	Small potential		18 %
	Moderate potential		30 %
	Large potential		40 %
	Very large potential		10 %

Just one out of five participants thinks that modifying software will have none to minimal effect. The majority has another opinion. “About 60 percent thinks that the purchase of energy efficient software is a good investment for the future. In practise, however, 83 percent of the people don’t mind the energy usage of software. When negotiating new applications the subject of energy usage is only mentioned in 9 percent of the cases. And even than, mostly as a secondary issue.”, says Ferreira.

Most people would like to see modern software to be equipped with an on/off switch, just as in cars. At the moment certain parts of the system are not in use, the software should switch them of. Ferreira: “The survey was not only useful for gathering experiences and opinions. It was also an eye opener for several participants. One of the participants admitted he had never thought about the subject in this manner.”

About the survey
The Internet survey focused on the relation between environmental sustainability and energy consumed by computers, not on hardware and data centre specific issues. Computers, as any other digital device, consume energy to perform work. This energy is consumed in the computer's hardware when operating to perform work. Although software itself does not consume any energy, it is responsible for demanding work from the hardware. Thus, the energy consumed by the hardware can and should be attributed to the software it’s running. The aim of the survey was to assess the awareness of software induced energy consumption issues and to assess what kinds of measures are already being used. The survey was presented in a workshop for Software Architects of the Knowledge Network Green Software on June 7th 2011.