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.

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.

I don’t dispute the rightness of this move in any way. I’m just curious whether computers are really such big global warming contributors as the article suggests. I would think that various chemical and fossil fuel power plants, as well as millions and millions of cars all around the globe have considerably greater effect on the planet when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions. As for the inefficiency of power consumption in desktop PC, it is a well-known fact. I just spent almost $200 to get a more efficient 750W power supply from Termaltake (up to 90% efficiency in power consumption as opposed to the ~55% generic one I used to have) and I have no doubts that steps like that will have a positive impact, no matter what their role on the planet’s global condition really is.

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.

Ever wondered how much electricity one computer consumes?
Then multiply it by the ammount of computers on earth.