Computer Factories Are the Energy Hogs 208
coondoggie writes "The main idea behind saving energy in the high-tech world has been to buy newer, more energy efficient devices, but researchers say that may be the wrong way to look at the issue, since as much as 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life span is used in manufacturing the computer (abstract). More energy would be conserved by reducing power used in the manufacturing of computers, rather than reducing only the amount of energy required to operate them, say researchers from Arizona State University and Rochester Institute of Technology."
Battery life! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm more interested in the battery life then total energy savings!
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Indeed. And how much more energy does it take to recycle the batteries that burn up faster if the laptops use more energy?
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But why not stick to the illusion that "energy savings" advertised on the box are the absolute ultimate truth. Hey, it works for solar panels [csudh.edu].
I'm sure the referenced articles, from the 1970s and 1980s, apply to solar cells made in the last few years.
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That's just it - the reason these mobile devices require far less energy to run than was required to manufacture them is that they're optimized for higher battery life, and therefore use relatively little power.
Compare this to desktops with 600W power supplies and I bet the figures will be completely different.
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A typtical desktop might have a 600W power supply (though that's probably on the high side for non-enthusiasts), but during normal use, which for a typical desktop is around 90% idle, it doesn't use anywhere near that much.
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This is true, of course, but there's still an an order of magnitude of difference between the actual power consumption of a laptop (10-40W + wall wart inefficiency depending on load) and a desktop (100-300W + PSU inefficiencies).
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My laptop has a 110W power supply, actually.... thought it's true, most of the time it's not under load. Even with the 24" LED (one of these [www.benq.ca]) I use as a 2nd display when it's docked at home, the system is using less than 75W total consumption (unless I'm gaming), and you'll struggle to find a desktop that approaches that kind of efficiency without getting something like a VIA C7 or other specialty system (I have a C7 1.5GHz-based system with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB laptop hard drive, and it draws 21W under l
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A desktop with similar performance characteristics (Core i7 quad, Radeon HD 4870 graphics) is going to draw 150-200W when idle.
+ at least 2 monitors at 40W a piece... why buy a Radeon 4870 if you're not going to hook up a screen (or 6)? :D
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Ok, actual numbers since I've got a "Kill-A-Watt" power monitor hooked up to my computer recently. I'm a gamer so this includes a high end graphics card, a not very efficient quad core CPU, 4 GB mem, 1 SSD, 1 HDD, a 24" LCD.
Playing a game: 360 W (SC2 if you must know...)
Normal Desktop use: 260-290W
Sleep Mode: 120 W
Power Off: 15W (From 5.1 speakers and monitor standby I believe)
What surprised me the most was how inefficient sleep mode was.
d
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Wow 120 W basically just to keep the memory clock refreshing? I'd guess you might not be in the right ACPI state for sleep mode, since laptops in sleep mode can last for a week on batteries that only last 2-4 hours in use, there should be a much larger decline there.
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The PSU might be 600W, but to give you some real world figures, lets take my system.
Built in 2006, Core2 Duo 1.86Ghz, GeForce 9600 graphics, 4GB ram, 2 hard drives, dvd RW drive, 550w PSU.
With everything going full throttle, it uses about 225 watts. At idle, it uses about 160 watts.
When you factor in the energy (in)efficiency of the PSU (lets say 75% at idle, 80% at full load), you get a total energy requirement of the components of 160*.75= 120w minimum (idle), 225*.8=180w. So between 120w and 180w are b
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I never said that a PC with a 600W PSU actually draws 600W - just that they use a lot more power than a laptop, which generally draws between 10 and 40W depending on the load and hardware... and that's INCLUDING the screen, which typically isn't the case for PC power consumption figures.
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Many chip manufactures are making great progress along that area. ARM chips and the Atom from Intel both are designed to address the energy consumption issue.
On the power consumption issue on servers, both manufacturing energy and operating energy has been drastically slashed.
The just announced 10 core server chips with Hyperthreading mean much lower power consumption and a much smaller server footprint. The addition of solid state drives reduces CPU idle time.
I just saw a demo of a 4 CPU 10 core server.
Misleading... (Score:2)
That may be true, but unless it takes more energy to produce energy efficient computers than the savings in running them, it's still a net savings.
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What happens if you avoid buying a new one? Keep the old one for a while longer... eg. until it actually stops working.
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That really depends on the usage. if you take 10 P33's and use them to do protein folding, it would probably be an overall energy savings to replace them with a single Core i7 laptop, even if you factor in the cost to produce the new laptop. You would gain more operations per second for less total energy cost.
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A top end core i7 would demolish any number of P4s in both performance and energy used. Newer architectures use smaller manufacturing, which requires less energy, have better performance-per-hz, and have better idling technologies.
To look at concrete numbers (source: [wikipedia.org]), lets take a Pentium 90mhz, which makes things easy by drawing 9.0w of power. It gets 10 mhz per watt. Lets compare to a hex-core Core i7 970, running @ 3.2gHz with a draw of 130w. It gets 24.6mhz per watt; and if you break it down to per-
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Keeping the computer for as long as it works is a good idea, absolutely. In my limited experience, though, a laptop really isn't made to last much longer then the typical 3-4 years they get used.
I've always "used up" my laptops the past decade or so. I have big machines at work for the heavy lifting, and any decent laptop made the last ten years is enough for my surfing, writing and so on. I'm a heavy user, admittedly, but so far my track record is 3-4 years.
The screen dims and grows red as the (non-replace
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Reading /. on an 8 year old laptop here. Replaced just about everything except for the mobo and screen (even resoldered a snapped USB port). In my experience first thing that fails on any laptop is the exhaust system, it overheats and shortens the life of everything else inside. You can find a lot of "broken" laptops on ebay that are just clogged up systems or systems with failed fans that crash due to heat issues rather than computer hardware failure. There would be less people buying new laptops if we cou
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This is an important point. If replacements ripple down through the used market so that extremely old systems are the ones being scrapped, while others are simply repurposed, it chages the equation somewhat. Still not enough in the case of computing for energy savings to be a sole motivator for upgrades, but still, trying to hand off your old systems to people running even older systems is a Good Thing (TM).
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Also, the productivity increases allowed by the use of laptops and computers far outweigh the alternative energy costs, by several orders of magnitude I'd say. I'm all for efficiency, but there is a distressing tendency to look at any energy use as being a bad thing. Energy is not in short supply, the only deficiency is in our ability to harness it effectively, an issue which I anticipate will be addressed over the coming fifty to a hundred years.
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You forgot a database vs the cost of feeding a hundred file clerks.
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I was more referring to using laptops versus say pen and paper.
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That's the case when the energy of building a new one is more than the double of the energy consumed by the total lifespan of the laptop. (remember that 70% is used to manufacture, 30% to operate it). Even if a newer one consumes zero energy, the manufacturing process will offset that.
As a mechanical engineer, I can tell you that bending, cutting or melting metal requires a LOT of energy. Try manufacturing a screw from a piece of metal using just simple tools and you will understand it.
If you want precision
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Only if you're throwing away an older device for the sole purpose of saving money. A newer laptops cost will far exceed the difference in the cost to run it over its lifetime.
Also, consider the incremental effects. One doesn't get to a Chevy Volt in one step from a 1969 Mustang. Each step along the path of producing productrs for less energy requires that someone buy those products to pay for the next stage. Otherwise, we'd all still be driving 1969 Mustangs and the Prius would have never been built.
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Otherwise, we'd all still be driving 1969 Mustangs and the Prius would have never been built.
It was proven some time ago that it is more environmentally friendly to keep old gas guzzlers on the road than it is to replace them with a new car simply due to the pollution and energy hits of the manufacturing process. Even so more with hybrids and electric cars using Li-On battery packs that need changing every 5 years. The increased fuel economy and lower emissions were not enough to offset the emissions and parts required to keep the older car running for the lifetime of the newer one.
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It was proven some time ago that it is more environmentally friendly to keep old gas guzzlers on the road than it is to replace them with a new car
[citation needed]
Some reactionary think tank or contrarian car magazine amateur journalist saying this doesn't make it true. Especially since we just did that with cash-for-clunkers and despite the obvious flaws of the program, it was pretty much a wash from an energy savings perspective. You have people arguing both ways on the matter, but the difference of op [wikipedia.org]
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Oh what would Slashdot be without people such as yourself and misleading statements.
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I think most greens tend to miss the amount of energy consumed by the industrial sector. Considering that it consumes more energy than residential and commercial combined, it's not surprising that the amount of energy used by a laptop over its lifetime is less than what it takes to manufacture it.
The energy usage by the industrial sector is why energy sources like solar and wind aren't acceptable. It's the industrial sector that drives the majority of the base load for power demands. There's nothing quite l
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Well, obviously the solution is more unions!
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The energy usage by the industrial sector is why energy sources like solar and wind aren't acceptable
Quite to the contrary, the industrial sector is the most flexible sector power-wise, as you can see from the fact that it is common for industry to coordinate its energy use with the utility. Also a lot of industry use is heat related, and happens during the day, and as such solar thermal preheating is becoming a popular cost shaving measure in industry. As power storage becomes cheaper it's almost a guara
Reduced prices too! (Score:3)
And of course if it requires less power to manufacture, then it is less expensive to produce. Thus the prices of consumer electronics would drop. Wait for it... wait for it.... Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh I just cracked myself up. The only difference we'd see is a little green sticker on the box where the OEM is bragging about saving the environment or something.
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And of course if it requires less power to manufacture, then it is less expensive to produce. Thus the prices of consumer electronics would drop. Wait for it... wait for it.... Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh I just cracked myself up. The only difference we'd see is a little green sticker on the box where the OEM is bragging about saving the environment or something.
You're right. The prices of consumer electronics never drop.
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It where the energy comes from. (Score:2, Insightful)
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The problem is there isn't any sort of completely "green" energy source.
The process of building a thermal solar generating system will produce a great deal of waste and it will likely use hazardous chemicals that will leak and cause environmental damage.
Certainly the process of making PV solar cells, wind turbines, or virtually anything else will involve great expenditures of energy, hazardous chemicals and lots and lots of waste. Just refining the metals alone is going to use tremendous amounts of energy,
As much as... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
As a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation; a 100W computer, used for 5 hours a day, 6 days a week for 5 years uses 780kWh of electricity. At current approximate UK prices that's £125 ($200 US). If computer manufacturing uses a significant fraction of that amount of power, then there is already a BIG incentive for the manufacturers to use less. If you tell them "you should use less of this thing that costs you money!" they will likely reply "well, duh", or if current trends continue they'll say "well, as part of our Greener World Of Tomorrow Plan, we're actively trying to reduce..."
Re:As much as... (Score:5, Informative)
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Unfortunately, most laptops are not manufactured in Britain, but in countries with much cheaper (and dirtier) electricity.
The price of the electricity is still very significant; in China for instance the electricity is cheaper than in the UK, but then everything else is too.
A little light research gives a wholesale price of $0.07 (£0.043)/kWh - http://www.vneconomynews.com/2011/03/china-attempts-to-raise-electricity.html [vneconomynews.com] - so the retail price will be higher than that. Even at the wholesale price, using the calculation i used above that comes to some £30 of electricity, and £30 is a lot of money in China.
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Hey, half the price is half the price no matter the original cost.
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Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
They probably compare laptops because laptop sales are higher than desktop sales. Most new computers are laptops.
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Probably a good portion of that is because they break so often and are far less repairable than a desktop machine.
Convienent? Sure, but the price is lack of repairability and a fragile nature. End result is a lot more laptops just get "used up" in one way or another and they are treated as a disposible commodity.
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Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
For the average user on /. I am sure that the energy consumption for manufacturing a laptop is MUCH higher than a desktop. For instance, I have been using the same case, PSU, monitor, keyboard, mouse and such for years, even through several CPUs and motherboards. It's just much easier to recycle a desktop's components.
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You pay 0.25USD/kWh? owned (it's 0.07USD/kWh in california...)
How much energy to manufacture a solar panel? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often wondered why I never hear that mentioned when people talk about clean energy. How much energy and resources go into making a single solar panel or wind turbine? Anyone?
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Not much energy goes into making a solar panel. Solar panel prices have been dropping dramatically over the past decades, and that would not be possible if they consumed lots of energy during manufacture because energy prices have gone up during that time. Currently, solar panels cost on the order of $1 per watt of power they can generate. Consuming one watt of electricity for a year costs on the order of $1. If the solar panel produces maximum power for an average of eight hours per day, it can generate at
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Did you factor in the energy cost of replacement blades and gearboxes over the life of the turbine in your calculations?
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You don't replace wings. Gearboxes are only replaced if they fail; their design life time is supposed to be as long as the life time of the entire turbine (at least 20 years).
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If the solar panel produces maximum power for an average of eight hours per day
then you need a tracking system. A fixed solar panel only produces maximum power once per year.
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Changes in price have exactly no effect on how much energy is required to produce the item or how much energy it will produce. And hence are irrelevant to the calculation at hand.
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The energy balance analysis in the case of the Vestas V90 3.0 MW shows that, for an offshore wind turbine 0.57 years (6.8 months) of expected average energy production are necessary to recover all the energy consumed for manufacturing, operation, transport, dismantling and disposal.
http://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/en/environment/chapter-1-environmental-benefits/energy-balance-analysis.html
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You should try listening to people talk about clean energy, then. It's one of the most common canards out there.
As for how much energy goes into making a solar panel, you can search for it yourself. Google is easy to use. Hint: in general, energy recapture time (amount of time before the energy the device produces is greater than the energy used to produce the device) is shorter than payback time (amount of time before the value of the energy it produces is greater than the cost of the device).
Alternative energy uses plenty of resources (Score:2)
When people mention so-called "clean" energy they sweep under the rug any inconvenient fact.
Both solar and wind power are very diffuse, they need huge areas of land. They say, "oh, it's just desert" if you mention the fact that you need hundreds or thousands of times more area for a solar plant than for a nuclear plant of the same power capacity.
Mention how wind turbines kill birds and bats and they will say "oh, that was the Altamont pass, that's obsolete by now". They never mention how obsolete the Cherno
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I'm not just sure if you're just trolling, but here goes:
* The only green energy is the one you don't use. Reducing our consumption is the only way to go. Still, it doesn't prevent us from saying that solar power is greener than coal or oil.
* Very diffuse? Sure, every energy source is diffuse compared to fission, fusion or oil. But in most European countries, producing 100% of the energy demand with solar panels would require to cover about 40% of the available roof area. It would be stupid to do so, but 50
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Put some Apple style spin on it (Score:2, Troll)
"Our new Macbooks are so energy efficient, they take even less energy to run than to manufacture them in the first place, making the lifetime energy consumption (% of total) our lowest EVER!"
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Yeah it appears you missed the joke about marketing spin, seems to have gone over a few heads that one.
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You're not supposed to care about that! (Score:4, Insightful)
The part you are supposed to care about is when you own and use it, not how it was made -- that is a matter that happens before it gets to you, so it doesn't concern you. Now, when I am saving energy, do I need to wear a green rubber band on my wrist? I've got this white one, yellow one, pink one... everyone needs to know what a great person I am.
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i really don't care how much power it takes to make or how much power i use at home. if the power we have now is somehow bad, lets focus on finding cleaner power then we don't have to reduce how much we use.
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there are plenty more options than that.
what about wind? hydro? geothermal? ocean wave/tidal generators? and fission?
there are plenty of better options for nuclear now, but we have added self imposed limitations on them. we are afraid to build new reactors because the old 70's style reactors are dangerous and scary...well we have come a long way since then. lets demolish those and build better ones that don't have those issues. another issue everyone seems to always cite is the buildup of nuclear wast
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add a small fraction here, and a small fraction there then eventually you will have a big fraction.
solar power is a good thing to work on, however we don't get all our electricity from a single source now. we spread it out to a number of different source. we get some from nuclear, some from coal, some from oil. getting it from multiple sources adds redundancy in case something happens to one of them.
yes, hydro and geothermal are more localized to geographic areas, but the places that have it can still p
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If energy costs accurately reflected the long-term harm of energy extraction, consumers wouldn't have to worry about anything but saving money. Cap and trade, anyone? Carbon tax? Personally I would vote for those things in a heartbeat, except there's no way to implement them globally. So we are stuck in a race to the bottom.
Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't really a consumer issue. There's no easy way for a purchaser to determine how much energy went into creating a computer, on the other hand, the amount of electricity used by the device however is easily determined and verifiable independently. Plus the purchasers pays the cost of running the machine as a separate cost, while the cost of the energy to produce the device in bundled in the purchase price. That's why people look more at how much power the computer uses (when they look at all).
Reducing the energy required to produce computers is essentially a manufacturer concern and they should already be working on that as a competitive cost advantage. I would guess it's probably not happening because most of these items are manufactured in countries that heavily subsidize their power systems and thus encourage waste by not requiring users to pay the full cost of the power they use. You want to reduce the power wasted during the production of goods? Stop subsidizing power usage and make sure the full costs are bore by the manufacturers. That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production.
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Re:Economics (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the beauty of price. It lets you know the most efficient way to do something without having to calculate how much of everything is used along the way. The only flaw like you stated is when the market is prevented from working correctly. Things like targeted taxes or tax breaks, subsidies, price control, and letting companies pollute in a way that externalizes costs (dumping waste in public water/air vs paying for proper disposal.)
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Well, the problem with your logic is that we don't pay anything for oil : we only pay the middle-person that extracts/refines/delivers it.
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That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production.
Seems that one of the habits of freemarket fanaticism is contradicting one's own arguments.
In any case, markets will not adjust themselves to reflect the environmental toll taken by their activities. They look for ways to externalize costs (usually to the environment) instead of adopting truly efficient and sustainable practices.
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You're right, I meant to say "would not be disastrous". The point being that they'll adapt to the tax by reducing the behavior that's taxed.
Well said. (Score:2)
Who gets the saving is important (Score:2)
Sine it costs roughly £1 per year for every Watt of a 24*7*365 machine (and more if you have cooling costs, too) the cost of powering a box can easily exceed the purchase cost - even without playing accountancy games s
Build them so they last, and repairable (Score:2)
One of the biggest issues is how often modern computers break down.
I see an awful lot of computers coming in to me that have failed due to broken connections on their motherboards. Mostly somewhere under the north- or southbridge chips, I think. Wherever the are, it is not repairable, at least, not without reflow stations and solder masks for every chip out there. Even then your return rate is going to be so high that you just couldn't do it. I don't know if it stands up to scrutiny, but I am blaming the si
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Uh...does this really matter? (Score:2)
The reason why I use compact florescent bulbs instead of conventional light bulbs is because if you replace EVERY SINGLE BULB in my entire house, the energy savings add up. Bu
4340 Megajoules? (Score:2)
At US$0.10 / kilowatt hour, that would be $120 worth of juice in a new laptop. That really can't be right, so it is obvious that they are not simply counting revolutions of a power meter.
So what does it mean? Did they use the same math to figure out how many megajoules it takes to deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Do you count the manufacturing energy costs in making all the equipment (circuit breaker panel, circuit breaker, wire, insulation, wall box, outlet, etc.) that delivers the power from the me
Re:4340 Megajoules? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect they probably are looking at the total energy costs to, e.g. extract raw materials from the ground, transport them, refine them, transport them again, manufacture them into finished product (potentially with additional shipping as individual chips and components get shipped from suppliers to the final OEM), manufacture and testing at the final oem, then transport the laptop and packaging to the final customer.
If you look at that entire 'lifecycle', I would absolutely NOT be surprised to find that $120 of a $500 laptop is energy costs.
However, the rule of thumb you give is a very good one - if you won't pay for the costs of the upgrade in energy savings (or productivity increases for the same energy spent, which is basically energy savings), then you probably aren't saving enough energy to offset the energy costs of the piece of equipment.
Because, in a very real sense, if you are buying a competitively priced item (that is, doesn't have very high margins) cost is pretty representative of the energy that went into making something. That rule of thumb doesn't apply to luxury goods like Mac's, Sports Cars, etc. which have high margins, but does for anything with tight margins.
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At US$0.10 / kilowatt hour, that would be $120 worth of juice in a new laptop.
At wholesale untaxed rates (we are talking developing countries after all), you should be able to get electricity at significantly lower prices than that, and the price for heating should be even lower.
Green is things for their full economic life (Score:2)
Its funny how the computer / high tech industry manges to remain seen by general public as green. When we have always known its anything but. Old style smoke stack industry cranking out sheets of steel and similar is probably far less ecologically harmful than any chip plant. The other big issue is water, semiconductor manufacturing uses LOTS of fresh water which is starting to become a scarce resource too. Finally the amount of energy used as pointed out in the article all the energy use probably amoun
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When it comes to this stuff we drive cars until its to costly to keep them on the road, we use computers as long as possible, that means not getting a new one every 24 months and trying to make software more efficient so we don't need so damn many. All those unneeded animations impose a COST, they are not free.
Damn straight. I use AdBlock because I'm Green, dammit!
Redistribution (Score:2)
For most purchase decisions, economics (to some degree) accounts for the amount of energy used in production. An exception is when some group tries to bias the market in favor of buying the "new, efficient" thing, even when it means that the "old, inefficient" things go to a landfill before their natural end of life.
An important, but often neglected, point to make is that energy used at the factory CAN come from more efficient, cleaner sources. Or at the very least, the energy-related pollution may be
Good Thing (Score:2)
This is actually a good thing. If the energy use is at a few central locations then it's easier to implement energy savings. If every computer made was an energy hog it would be much harder to modify every single one to make them more energy efficient.
Large industrial plants consumer energy? (Score:2)
No way!
It might be time to remember that mass production is more efficient than cottage industry, at-home lot production. Not that companies shouldn't try to be energy efficient, but looking at only the energy consumption of a place without thinking about how that energy is put to use is myopic.
A losing proposition? (Score:2)
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Please stop propagating lies.
It is not the same with the Prius. At least not as far as energy consumption is concerned.
In case of a car the energy consumption in manufacturing is on average an order of magnitude smaller than the energy consumption during its use. We are talking 10% of total consumption vs more than 80%. You can refer to page 10 of these notes (pdf) [cam.ac.uk] to see the figures for an average family car.
In case of assessing energy impact of various stages of product manufacturing common sense will nev
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This assumes, of course, that you're buying a brand-new Prius and that buying a brand-new car and keeping your current car are equally-viable options.
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Incidentally, it costs about a thousand gallons of gas worth of energy to build a new Prius. Depending on the mpg of your gas guzzler, it can take as little as 25,000 miles to pay off the energy cost of building the Prius.
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Just tax energy use more and energy use goes down. And don't forget to close the corporate loopholes.
Much more important is to close the personal loopholes, to avoid situations like in California [wikipedia.org], where "deregulation" meant keeping retail prices regulated at artificially low values.
Only problem is, the politicians who make those regulations are elected by the people who use that electricity. The simpler solution is doing exactly what they did: increase regulation and call it "deregulation", that way everyone is happy. Until they run out of electricity.
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Just tax energy use more and energy use goes down. And don't forget to close the corporate loopholes.
Much more important is to close the personal loopholes, to avoid situations like in California [wikipedia.org], where "deregulation" meant keeping retail prices regulated at artificially low values.
Only problem is, the politicians who make those regulations are elected by the people who use that electricity. The simpler solution is doing exactly what they did: increase regulation and call it "deregulation", that way everyone is happy. Until they run out of electricity.
You seem to have missed the entire point of the article you linked to.
The only effect of the still-regulated retail price was to stick the utilities with enormous bills instead of the consumers. As the article clearly states, the cause of the mess was not the regulated retail price, it was the unregulated price charged by the producers. They figured out that they could make more money by artificially limiting supply (which they accomplished by collectively taking something like 30-40% of power plants in Cal