>
> http://www.industcards.com/ppworld.htm
Actually, that's a pretty cool site.
I'm sorry to be a fact Nazi in this, but I think that if we're talking
about saving the world from predicted environmental disaster based on
scientific research, then we should use more accurate statistics.
> Suppose we wanted to double the number of automobiles in the world.
> We'd likely be looking at something like an 80% increase in power
> consumption. That's a rough estimate based on zero research, but
> whatever the correct number is, it's going to be way way way over 1%.
> And a car takes WAY more energy when it's in use!
The difference is that cars are based on converting something that has
energy in it (Petroleum). Not using energy from a power plant. Never
thought of it this way before, but cars are like mini power plants.
> Says that a ford escort uses 110 horsepower = 82,026 watts. So,
> driving a Ford Escort (my old one used to get about 33 mpg (need I
> point out that the escort is not among the highest performance
> vehicles ever designed?)) for ONE MINUTE is roughly the same power
> consumption of leaving a desktop computer idle (at 60 watts) for ONE
> DAY. The twelve hours of driving I'm planning on this weekend to
> visit my parents will the amount of energy of two years of leaving my
> desktop turned on 24/7. And cars are mobile things with difficult
> emissions control problems. The computers' new power plants could be
> anything from wind farms to fuel cells.
This is why I responded to your email. I realize that obviously the
power output of a car that is turned on is not 0 watts when its in park
or even when you are coasting. Obviously, its consuming fuel. But its
also obviously not producing 82000 watts all the time when its running.
However, it wouldn't be a direct relationship between the rpms of the
engine and the watts it produces. So I'm not sure you could say
something like when you run the engine at 1/4 of full throttle that it
would produce only 82000 watts. I agree with your comparison though,
cars do use a lot more power than computers.
Actually, I think the most effective way to conserve power in regards
to your home computer is to keep them away from your thermostat.
Computers generate quite a bit of heat these days. We have two story
house and the office used to be upstairs with three computers there at
least one was on most of the time. The thermostat was also on that
floor. When I moved the computers downstairs this year and the
temperature in that room dropped 5 degrees F. The extra heat upstairs
in the summer was causing the thermostat to continue to drive the AC and
make the downstairs colder than it should have been. Now with the
computers downstairs, the temperature is more consistent in the house
and probably it helps more in the winter since the heat will rise
through the house a bit. There should be some scientific study to back
this up.
I found the "Energy efficiency" section of this article interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_power_supply
And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency
Computers are much more efficient than I expected. 93% efficiency is
pretty impressive. So why are we making such a big deal about it? It
seems that as long as we use our computers for useful things while they
are on (like writing this email), its not really all that wasteful.
So in this way, servers are generally not wasting much energy. Its
obvious that people understand this though because the desktop is where
all the power saving technologies are like turning off the monitor, hard
drive sleep, etc.
Ok, I've rambled on long enough. Scott Blaydes could tell you about
his dream of having a data center that is solar powered though. :-)
--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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