Will the last IBMer accepting early retirement incentives please turn out the lights? When you get an army of people off your pay-roll, you would expect that all the associated costs of employing people, not least the amount of power needed to keep them lit and warmed or cooled, not to mention their computers running, would go down – but in the wake of Rio, everyone is indulging in energy-saving hype and so IBM Corp is trumpeting the news that its year-to-year energy consumption from 1990 to 1991 remained virtually flat for the first time in a decade, thanks largely to conservation efforts at IBM manufacturing and development sites worldwide – energy-management programs helped IBM save more than $32m in electricity costs in 1991 and the unused 340m KiloWatt-hours cut carbon dioxide production associated with electrical power generation by some 210,000 tons – but it doesn’t say what happened to the power used-per-employee figure.
