Google proposes Green PCs plan
Search engine giant Google and US semiconductor firm Intel have thrown their weight behind a massive scheme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The ambitious plan sets out an industry-wide target to cut the amount of energy computers consume by 2010. The scheme is expected to cut emissions by 54 million tonnes a year – equal to 11 million cars or 20 coal-fired power plants, company officials say. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft have all signed up to the campaign. Computers and other IT equipment have been blamed for causing as much global warming as the airline industry. He estimated that using energy-efficient technology would make computers about $20 (£10) more expensive and servers about $30 pricier, but these costs would be offset by lower electricity bills.
Utilities will be encouraged to offer rebates to consumers who buy the ‘green PCs’. Manufacturers who agree to the climate-saving program agree to design, produce and sell equipment that meet the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star standard of 80% initially.That will rise to 90% by 2010. The initiative is an extension of the World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Savers program, which helps companies to reduce their harmful greenhouse gas emissions.Initial supporters also include Yahoo, Hitachi and Sun Microsystems. Hm, is Google’s next plan buying Greenpeace?
Source: BBC
Comments(9)
You mean donate?
They can’t ‘buy’ Greenpeace.
Very nice initiative, although I have a slight difficulty seeing computers as major contributors to global warming. What’s next? Cellphones?
@ Boo
Ever wondered how much electricity one computer consumes?
Then multiply it by the ammount of computers on earth.
Although it’s not mentioned it in the article, one of the largest problems computer have is their inefficiency in using the electricity they consume.
Estimates place that about 40-50% of the electricity that your home computer consumes is actually used by the components in the system (servers are usually better, but still in the 30-40% waste range).
One of the primary efforts of the Energy Star program is to make the electronics more energy efficient in actually using what they take from your wall outlet.
Less energy wasted translates into less energy needed .. which means less that has to be generated .. which leads to less CO2 emissions by energy plants.
I think the most energy use is in the processes involved in producing things like cpu etc.
if every country in the world went solar/wind/hydro, Energy production would create zero greenhouse gas emissions.
why dont we go to the source. energy efficiency is great, but it would be irrelevant if we werent reliant on coal, gas and oil.
edits, I agree with your statement, but unfortunately the costs, reliance, and other factors don’t make it as feasible as possible.
I was going to go into a summary of a lot of the various issues at debate right now (initial costs, city design, efficiency, strategic considerations, etc), but I’ll just point you towards some of the places to get a good look at the arguments going on and you can draw your own conclusions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_economics (great place to start)
http://www.uic.com.au/nip07.htm
Bottom line (I will throw one of these in) .. If there were a cheap, renewable, clean source of power, the pressure to adopt it would be considerable. The problem is, there isn’t. Solar and wind power costs about 8x as much per kilowatt hour than gasoline does and about 20x that of coal. The efficiency of many renewable sources are up to the energy demands that are required and ones that do face intense political battles (the newest/largest solar array in the world generates 1/40th of the power that a modern nuclear power station can) for acceptance.
It’s a very complex problem that has everything from politics to market forces driving it.
Solar, wind, and hydro will save the environment? Huh, wha…?!? Ignoring for the moment that solar only lets you turn on the lights when the sun is out (hint : we have no way to store power in the gigawatt range, and what power storage options we have are extremely inefficient), wind when it’s windy (you’d better not need medical care on a windless day), and that we’ve put hydro pretty much everywhere there is to put hydro, even assuming those were options do you really think that energy is ‘free’, as in it won’t change the environment?
We already know that putting up a dam changes the environment, often substantially. Change the albedo of a substantial chunk of land, something any form of solar energy is going to do by definition and solar plants to replace even a small percentage of our energy usage would cover a staggering chunk of space, and you’re going to change the weather. At its simplest wind is weather, take energy out of the wind and you change the weather. A few dozen Condor Cuisinarts aren’t going to change things enough to matter, but enough to power a city? Now you’re talking real energy, now you’re talking about changing the weather.
You take energy out of a system, you change the system. Take a little, you change it a little, take a lot and you change it a lot. If there’s one thing physics teaches, it’s that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
The only ‘clean’ option available to us right now, today, is nuclear, but that’s an option many prefer to ignore in favor of solar and wind fantasies. Beyond that, and absent some unexpected breakthrough in fusion (don’t hold your breath for that to happen), our only options are an orbiting solar station or core-drilled geo-thermal.
An orbiting station is just possible, but would be hugely expensive and risky. The many technical hurdles aside, just try explaining to people that you’re going to be beaming down giga-joules of energy via microwave or laser and if the beam were to go off course it’d fry a city. We have a hard enough time keeping a regular space station up and running, an orbiting power station, while possible, just ain’t gonna happen.
The other option is a little more realistic. Make the biggest, honkenist laser you can, something you’d have to build a nuke plant just to power, and drill a hole down 100 miles or so. Pump in water, run resulting steam through turbines, and you’d have yourself one hell of a power plant that you could basically run for as long as we’re on this godforsaken dirtball. Drill one of these near every major city and your power problems go away. If we started right now with doing all the research needed in order to actually do it we might actually have them up and running before we ran out of oil. Of course that’s not actually going to happen, it’d cost a ton of money, involve risk, and most people are happier fantasizing about Condor Cuisinarts with PVs all over them rather than looking for actual long term solutions.