Change Windows Power Plan from CMD

As you probably already know the regular users of these laptops, the Redmond software presents us with several functions related to energy. Specifically, they allow us to change and customize this team’s energy plan, all depending on what we give priority to at that moment, power or autonomy.

And it may be the case that we are, for example, in a means of travel transport, and it will take a while to reach our destination. So we are interested in prioritizing autonomy over power.

Of course, the moment we reach our destination and we already have access to the electricity grid, we may prefer that the team works in a more fluid way, so we change the energy parameters again.

Adjust the power plan from the Windows interface

For this we have different ways of adjusting Windows so that it works better consuming more battery, that is to say more slowly, but increases the autonomy of the PC.

Of course, everything will depend on the needs of each one at a certain time. Therefore, a very simple way to do this is by clicking on the battery icon in the toolbar. A window will appear with a slide bar where we can specify a longer battery life, or better performance. We can also opt for a middle ground.

At the same time, we can also click on that same icon with the right mouse button to select Energy options. Here we find the predefined energy plans on our PC so that we can switch between one and the other, or define a personalized one.

But in these same lines we are going to show you how to change the power plan in Windows 10 from the CMD. This will allow us to make use of various power settings from the Command Prompt itself. For this we will use the powercfg command of the operating system, as we are going to see.

How to change Windows power plan from CMD

To begin we will tell you that the command powercfg is a useful command line tool that has been around for many years. It allows us to manage various aspects of the energy plans that we have talked about. From it we can carry out tasks such as creating, edit or delete power plans. In addition, we can or disable some functions such as hibernation.

Export a plan in Windows from CMD

To export a power plan through the command line, the first thing we do is run the Command Prompt as such. To do this, we go to the search box on the Windows taskbar and type the CMD command and with the right button on the result we select the option Execute as an administrator.

Thus, to achieve what we are looking for in this case, we write the following command to generate a list with the available power plans:

powercfg /list

What we are looking for here is to export one of these energy plans to a .pow file, so we use the command:

powercfg /export C:/ruta_archivo Número de plan

For example, in the case that concerns us here, the order would be this:

powercfg /export C:/prueba_softzone.pow 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e

Therefore, once the steps are completed, the selected power plan will be exported to the .pow file »that we have specified in the command.

Import a power plan into Windows from CMD

On the other hand, to import a power plan in the Command Prompt, we write the following command to import the .pow file that we created before, for example: powercfg /import C:/prueba_softzone.pow

Obviously in the command we specify the file path, so once the process is completed, the power plan it will be imported to the PC.

How to create a power plan on the command line

Say that we can also create power plans with custom settings. Of course, there is no option to create a new plan, so we have to duplicate an existing plan and modify it according to our needs. Therefore, to do this, the first thing is to generate a list of available plans as we saw before with the powercfg / list command. Next we are going to create a new power plan with the command: powercfg /duplicatescheme 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e for the case that we are made here.

Obviously each one will use the identifier of the energy plan on which they wish to work in their team. Now we are going to make a copy of the balanced plan with the order:

powercfg /changename “NUMERO_PLAN” “NOMBRE”

What we must know here is that we must replace the previous power plan number with the new plan number that we want to rename and assign a name to it, without the quotes.

Once we have created the new power plan, we are going to set it as the default in the system, which is what we are looking for in these same lines. For this we use the command:

powercfg /setactive NUMERO_PLAN

We must bear in mind that NUMERO_PLAN corresponds to the number of the power plan that we now want to use from this moment on.

It is worth mentioning that these same movements that we have detailed, you can carry out as many times as necessary. Actually, all you need is to change the power plan number to directly establish the one that interests you the most in each case. All of them, as we saw the beginning, appear on the screen with the command:

powercfg /list