The Road to Net Zero: How Test Labs Can Reduce Energy Use

Modern test labs are like small data centers, with racks of hardware testing modules connected to software that engineers use for analysis and data-driven decision-making. As in data centers, this process produces GHG emissions that are typically “out of sight, out of mind.” That is because every technology product has a lifecycle, and each phase of that lifecycle produces GHG emissions. Raw materials are sourced from the Earth to create the product’s parts, and then the product is manufactured, transported, and used until it reaches end of life, when it is then disposed of or recycled. Typically, the use phase accounts for the vast majority of emissions.

Lifecycle of PXI Systems

In a 2021 lifecycle analysis⁵ of its PXI systems, which have a long lifespan of 10+ years, NI found that 96 percent of the products’ GHG emissions came during the use phase.

^{Figure 1: After less than six months of use, the environmental impact of the PXI’s power consumption is equivalent to the impact incurred during all other stages of the lifecycle combined.}

Technical Challenges to Reducing Energy Use

Reducing emissions associated with product use in a test lab is not as simple as turning off all systems when they aren’t in use. It is a more complex endeavor for several reasons:

• Test labs are heterogeneous environments, with many different types of systems that each have their own use patterns and energy outputs.
• Determining when a test system is in use may be challenging because background tasks may be running that aren’t using test equipment directly, or test equipment may be running with minimal CPU usage.
• Global teams often share the same testing systems, so they are in use around the clock as team members log on during different time zones.
• Ill-timed shutdowns pose the risk of losing critical work.
• Many test and measurement instruments require a specific warm up time before the instrument will meet its performance specifications.

Organizational Challenges to Reducing Energy Use

Further, a company’s test team may be siloed from its sustainability team, which is responsible for setting emissions goals, and the facilities team, which is responsible for implementing energy efficiency measures and paying utility costs. Test teams may thus be unaware of how their efforts can make an impact. And it may also be unclear which team has the budget and decision-making authority to implement energy efficiency measures.

One of the first conservation solutions that test lab managers may consider is to use more energy-efficient products. NI’s PXI products are already quite efficient, as they heavily leverage commercial, off-the-shelf PC components and technologies whose power consumption has been optimized. So, managers should focus their efforts instead on more efficient use.

A traditional approach to improving energy efficiency in a corporate facility would entail calculating the facility’s overall energy use, determining how much could be saved by powering off equipment during off hours, and then installing smart shut-off technologies and/or developing shut-down procedures for teams to follow. Managers might also consider scheduling some of the facility’s work during off-peak hours, which would not reduce overall energy use but could potentially reduce utility costs in some areas.

Diverse Technologies Require Complex Analysis

Because test labs are highly diverse technology environments, with systems conducting critical work on different timetables, each system must be audited and analyzed individually. Test lab managers must answer questions such as:

• Which systems are using the most power?
• How many hours is each system running?
• How is each system being used, and by whom?
• Which systems need to run as-is, and which could be powered down when not in use?
• What are the risks of an ill-timed shutdown?
• How will we implement shut-down procedures?
• Is scheduling more of our workload during non-peak hours an option?
• How will we track our energy savings?

Manual Analysis Is Cumbersome

Conducting such an analysis manually is cumbersome and time-consuming, especially because test station usage data is variable and must be gathered over a long enough period to identify trends.

A lab-wide, automatic shutdown of equipment after hours is not usually feasible because other global team members may need to access some systems remotely, and an ill-timed shutdown could risk losing critical work. Some test systems need up to one to two hours to warm up or recalibrate when powered back up, and teams must also account for this startup time.

Alternatively, relying on team members to follow shut-down protocols presents some challenges. Managers must assign points of contact for various systems and educate them about why, when, and how to power down without disrupting collaborative global work.

How can test lab managers reduce their labs’ technology-related energy use and emissions with less effort and more accuracy? The solution is readily available—within test and measurement technologies themselves. By using these technologies to address conservation challenges, managers can automate the process of:

• Measuring energy usage of each system and the lab as a whole
• Identifying trends in energy use and the greatest opportunities for savings or workload scheduling
• Automating protocols for systems to shut down when not in use and/or for workload scheduling and load balancing
• Tracking reductions in energy use and during peak times and overall

Measuring Energy Use

Some technology products have built-in capabilities to measure their energy usage. However, this may not be true for all products within the lab. For systems without built-in capabilities, the easiest way for test lab managers to set up automated measurement of their technology systems is to connect external measurement hardware to the devices in their labs.

The next step would be to set up a software program to continuously collect and analyze energy usage data from the measurement hardware. Helpful metrics to track include overall energy consumption, user habits, usage times, and system-specific energy usage. Managers should track these metrics until trends emerge.

Identifying Conservation Opportunities

Measurement software can provide test managers with a full analysis of their labs that maps energy usage to team needs and shows opportunities for conservation and cost reductions. When identifying the best opportunities, the “sweet spot” for managers to look for are systems that are drawing a lot of power and sitting idle unnecessarily. Additionally, managers can look for opportunities to schedule workloads in a way that avoids peak utility costs while optimizing equipment utilization.

Automating Conservation

Once conservation measures have been identified, the most advanced strategy for implementing them is to set up an automated shutdown of systems when they aren’t in use. Options here include setting simple power on and off schedules or enabling remote power control. In the future, companies could also consider deploying advanced analytics to examine use patterns and make recommendations on when tests should be executed and when systems could be powered off, as well as artificial intelligence to automate those actions.

Tracking Reductions

Ongoing assessment of conservation measures is critical to informing corporate sustainability reporting and making the case for further measures throughout the company. Test managers can use the same software they used for initial measurement to track ongoing usage.

Test Labs as a Test Case

NI has a goal to become a climate-neutral company by 2030.⁶ Reaching this goal will require the company to make enterprise-wide changes while also taking an “energy treasure hunt” approach to find smaller opportunities for reductions at each site. Working together, NI’s research and development and facilities teams found that 4 percent of the company’s energy use came from its in-house test labs⁷, which are used to test the development of NI products. This made the labs an ideal target for a manageable but impactful reduction campaign.

Measurement Solution: Smart PDUs + SystemLink™ Software

The NI R&D team decided to analyze the energy used by one of its Austin labs, which contains hundreds of test systems, including 151 PXI(e) systems. NI’s PXIe-1095, PXIe-1092, and PXIe-1084 chassis have best-in-class, built-in energy measurement capabilities. To complement these capabilities, we plugged all the lab’s equipment into smart power distribution units.

To monitor power, the team used SystemLink, which allows users to manage automated test systems, data collection, and reporting from a central location and use product-centric analytics to provide actionable insights. During this investigation, NI prototyped some changes to its PXI firmware and application software to improve power monitoring and control.

Quantifying Potential Savings

NI’s team found that, while many systems are needed 24x7 or are already shut down when not in use, a majority of systems remain on during idle time. They extrapolated the Austin results to NI’s labs in Debrecen, Hungary, and Penang, Malaysia.

By powering down appropriate test systems when idle, each year NI could see the following savings⁸:

• 561, 600 KWh in purchased electricity (1% of NI total)
• 389 Metric Tons of CO2e, the equivalent of taking 89 employees’ cars off the road for a year

^{Figure 2: Usage and Power Patterns in NI Test Lab Systems}

Scaling Emissions Savings

Using this analysis, the NI lab team has begun implementing automated shutdown and restart of their PXI systems using the technologies outlined in the next section, resulting in reduced electrical use, lower carbon footprint, and long-term financial savings.

By implementing energy efficiency initiatives in its own labs first, NI was able to analyze which product features and technologies would be most useful today in measuring lab equipment power usage and controlling power states in an automated fashion. It also helped inform features that NI could add to its products in the future to make this capability easier and more powerful for customers.

Current Capabilities

The first challenge customers face is measuring power usage of the test system over time. The NI PXIe-1095, PXIe-1092, and PXIe-1084 chassis all have built-in capability to report power usage directly. However, not all instrumentation equipment has this functionality, so for uniform measurement of all products, users can mirror NI’s approach of plugging all equipment into smart power distribution units.

SystemLink is extensible, which enables customers to create custom client Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks. The NI team created several energy dashboards using these features.

^{Figure 3: Energy Dashboard Created with NI Hardware, SystemLink, Python Code, and Jupyter Notebook}

After measurement, the next step is automating the powering down and up of PXI instruments. Because PXI controllers run common operating systems, users can employ standard protocols for remotely shutting down the systems. Turning them back on is a more challenging task. PXI chassis, like many standard PCs but unlike most test and measurement box instruments, can automatically power on when power is supplied. Like the NI team, other users can use the functionality of smart PDUs to supply power at the appropriate time to turn the systems back on. Dependent on the system needs, the PXI ecosystem includes many other options for the remote power on test systems, including Wake-on-LAN and a hardwired power inhibit signal in most chassis, which allows external device control of the power.

Partnering with NI

NI customers can use SystemLink and NI hardware to measure their wasted power, optimize their power consumption, save money, and meet their corporate sustainability goals. We are also continuing to investigate ways to make this process easier for monitoring both NI and non-NI equipment. Partnering with NI enables customers to work with a supplier that shares their commitment to reducing emissions.

Contact NI for more information on how SystemLink can help you optimize your power consumption and minimize your environmental impact. We also welcome your feedback on what energy-efficiency solutions and services you would like to see from us.

• Learn more about SystemLink
• Contact NI about SystemLink

• ¹United Nations Climate Action, For a livable climate: Net-zero commitments must be backed by credible action
• ²Harvard Business Review, Why Companies Aren’t Living Up to Their Climate Pledges
• ³Reuters, California governor says he will sign climate bill on companies and carbon footprints
• ⁴Science Based Targets, Taking the Temperature: Assessing and Scaling Up Climate Ambition in the G7 Business Sector
• ⁵NSF, Life Cycle Analysis of NI PXI Systems
• ⁶NI 2030 Corporate Impact Strategy, Climate Neutrality Goal
• ⁷Internal Calculations from NI R&D Team 
• ⁸U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator