How to Export and Import Power Plans in Windows

On Windows, you can easily create, edit, and delete power plans to optimize the performance and power consumption of your computer.  The only caveat is that if you have a lot of devices or reinstall Windows, these settings won't sync across all of them with your Microsoft account.

Luckily, you can export the custom power settings into a ".pow" file that you can then quickly deploy to other devices or to newly installed Windows computer.

In this Windows guide, we walk you through the steps to export and import power plans on different Windows PCs or newly installed Windows PC.

Make sure to create a custom power plan with the settings you want to deploy, and then follow these steps to export the configurations using the PowerCFG command tool:

1. Open the Command Prompt by clicking Start Menu --> All Programs --> Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt, and open it as an administrator. In Windows Vista and later versions of Window operating systems type cmd.exe into Start Screen or Start Menu, right-click on Cmd.exe, and open it as an administrator.

2. Type the following command to view a list of the available power schemes and press Enter:



3. Using a left-click of the mouse, click and select the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) name for the power plan you want to export, and right-click the selection to copy it to the clipboard.



4. Type the following command to export the power plan you want to deploy to other devices and press Enter:





The above command exports the "My Costum Power Plan" settings into "my-costum-power-plan.pow" file and save it to root of the C: partition.








How to Import a Saved Power Plan Settings

After exporting the settings, you'll end up with ".pow" file extension that you can import and set as the new default power plan on other devices.

To import a power plan, make sure to save the power plan settings to USB drive with the ".pow" file extension and use these steps to import the plan:

1. Open the Command Prompt by clicking Start Menu --> All Programs --> Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt, and open it as an administrator. In Windows Vista and later versions of Window operating systems type cmd.exe into Start Screen or Start Menu, right-click on Cmd.exe, and open it as an administrator.

2. Type the following command to view a list of the available power schemes and press Enter:





3. Type the following command to list the power schemes to figure out the GUID for the new plan and press Enter:



4. Type the following command to activate the newly imported power plan and press Enter:





5. Type the following command to verify that the new power plan settings are used by Windows and press Enter:





Once you complete these steps, the device will use the new custom settings to optimize power usage.