Under the auspices of a General Services Administration (GSA) contract, the Federal Government has started to move more aggressively when it comes to saving money on electricity.

The GSA has inked a pact with BigFix, a provider of managed services for PCs, that will allow Federal IT organizations to download an agent that keeps track of how much power any individual PC is consuming at a cost of $3 per computer. That agent software can then be linked to a BigFix service that will automatically turn PCs off or power down specific components of the system.

As part of an overall green computing initiative being promoted by the Federal Government, the BigFix service is now available as a SmartBuy option under the terms of the GSA purchasing plan. That means that approval to purchase the BigFix service will be fast tracked by the GSA. The deal has the potential to save the Federal Government billions of dollars on power consumption. Already organizations such as Miami Dade County Schools in Florida say they expect to save $2.1 million annually by leveraging the BigFix service across 80,000 systems.

Multiplying that kind of savings across multiple Federal agencies could provide savings on power costs that would be orders of magnitude higher at a labor cost of about two hours of installation time per machine.

The service also allows IT administrators to easily see how power each machine is using and what it costs to power those machines each kilowatt hour, which ultimately may prove more interesting to PC manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell.

After all, one of the more compelling system upgrade arguments that a manufacturer can make today is tied to lowering the cost of energy it takes to power systems. New machines can frequently pay for themselves within a year on power savings alone. Of course, that begs the question why aren't PC manufacturers footing the bill for services such as BigFix. After all, they might have the most to gain by making the case for PC upgrades.

BigFix, meanwhile, hopes that Federal IT organizations will decide to use its other system management services once the company's agent technology is broadly deployed across their organizations.