Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Are Games Consoles Really Gas Guzzlers?

Published
by
monkchips
on May 30, 2008
in energy
. 0 Comments

I found this story Interesting.

Apparently after the first “green” CebIT Greenpeace accused games console vendors of ignoring environmental concerns. some of the language and framing in the story is pretty darned strident.

Worldwide computer use requires 14 power stations for the necessary electricity, producing more harmful carbon dioxide emissions than the entire airline industry - not including the emissions created and manufacturing and shipping around the products in the first place.

And games consoles - of which 62 million were sold in last year - are the gas guzzlers of this industry, using huge amounts of energy to generate the necessary mindblowing graphics and sounds.

When played online, they are linked up to huge server farms which use even more energy.

And with each generation of console - we are currently on the seventh - repeatedly made obsolete by the newest technology, millions of machines, games and other accessories are thrown away, destined often for the developing world.

The gas guzzler comment gives me pause for thought because its so clearly rhetorical. I don’t actually know the wattage of these consoles (more homework!) but the story doesn’t appear to either. Its true though that hardcore gamers don’t tend to use a low wattage laptop. But what would a 17 year old be doing if not gaming? Driving around in a car their parents just bought them? Taking off to go travelling. Or maybe something carbon light.

Where the vendors have fallen down is in not responding to Greenpeace assertions. Microsoft, Nintendo, and SONY, and not one could muster a response. Not even IBM, which supplies the chips for the consoles, had anything to say. Note to the gaming industry: you may not be environmentally unsound, but you need a better story to tell. If I were you I would be talking about Bit Miles - how you’re encouraging the move to digital everything. Electrons are cheaper to ship that atoms.

That 50 inch plasma though… that’s a lot of electrons.

 

 

picture courtesy of blakespot on Flickr, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

by-sa

Is SaaS Green?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on May 29, 2008
in bit miles
. 4 Comments

Back of envelope calculations

Is a hosted app more Green than hosting your own? Is Software as a Service (SaaS) more environmentally than the more traditional models?

I contacted a number of SaaS vendors (who, admittedly, may have a vested interest in this!) but the answers were a resounding yes.

Chris Yeh, for example, from PBWiki did some quick back of the envelop calculations and replied with:

PBwiki hosts 500,000+ wikis on a total of 20 servers
If a server consumes 200 watts of power, that’s 1.75 megawatt hours/server/year (200*24*365)
According to Sun’s Dave Douglas (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php), that’s the equivalent of 1.17 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or driving an SUV 2,300 miles
That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki’s are replacing an individual server but say 100 PBWikis replaces one server, or 1,000. That’s still somewhere between 600 and 6,000 tons of CO2 PBWiki are saving the planet per annum.

Anyone got harder numbers than that around the energy efficiency of SaaS?

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High oil prices are a good thing!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on May 29, 2008
in oil
. 6 Comments

Houston Smartypants Car
Creative Commons License photo credit: Lori Greig

I wrote a post a couple of weeks back saying that the sooner oil reaches $200 per barrel, the better. Unsurprisingly, it generated a bit of comment!

So I was mighty chuffed to read Thomas Friedman’s superb Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday where he made a very similar argument.

Thomas said:

there is no short-term fix for gasoline prices. Prices are what they are as a result of rising global oil demand from India, China and a rapidly growing Middle East on top of our own increasing consumption, a shortage of “sweet” crude that is used for the diesel fuel that Europe is highly dependent upon and our own neglect of effective energy policy for 30 years.

Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.

I like the discounted cigarettes to teenagers analogy but it doesn’t go far enough. You give discounted cigarettes to teenagers, you kill them. You give discounted petrol/gas and you kill the planet. In effect, with its massive subsidies for oil companies (subsidies for oil companies? who thought that was a good idea?), this is what the United States administration has been doing for decades. But we digress.

He goes on to quote the arguments of energy economist Philip Verleger Jr. who wants a “price floor” - a guaranteed minimum price below which gas will not go:

$4 a gallon for regular unleaded, which is still half the going rate in Europe today. Washington would declare that it would never let the price fall below that level. If it does, it would increase the federal gasoline tax on a monthly basis to make up the difference between the pump price and the market price.

To ease the burden on the less well-off, “anyone earning under $80,000 a year would be compensated with a reduction in the payroll taxes,” said Verleger. Or, he suggested, the government could use the gasoline tax to buy back gas guzzlers from the public and “crush them.”

But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down. Therefore, if you buy a big gas guzzler today, you are locking yourself into perpetually high gasoline bills. You are buying a pig that will eat you out of house and home. At the same time, if you, a manufacturer, continue building fleets of nonhybrid gas guzzlers, you are condemning yourself, your employees and shareholders to oblivion.

With the current high prices for gas/petrol in Europe and the US, the message is starting to get through. Te demand for hybrid cars is growing daily as Thomas noted when he went to buy a new one:

I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why.

The absolute worst thing which could happen now would be for oil prices to drop again. Companies who had invested heavily in renewables would potentially go out of business and fuel efficiency would no longer be a primary concern for car buyers.

No, high oil prices are a good thing. Nothing will move us off the carbon economy as effectively as a strong financial incentive.

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San Francisco rolls out carbon tax

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on May 28, 2008
in co2
. 0 Comments

I see the LA Times is reporting that the San Francisco Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s board of directors voted overwhelmingly (15-1) in favour of levying a carbon tax on businesses.

The tax will be 4.4 cents per tonne of CO2 emitted which, in reality is paltry:

More than 2,500 businesses will be required to pay the proposed fees. About seven power plants and oil refineries would have to pay more than $50,000 a year, but the majority of businesses would pay less than $1, according to district estimates.

But this rate will increase with time and this news is massively significant in other ways.

This is the first instance of a carbon tax in the US, according to the piece in the LA Times, although the New York Times reports that Boulder Colorado was first when it imposed a carbon tax in Nov 2006 on both businesses and homes.

Either way, this is an indication of things to come. The best way to reduce carbon emissions is to charge for them (and the damage they wreak).

More and more we will see the implementation of carbon taxes and this more than anything else will force us to reduce our CO2 output.

We in GreenMonk are firm believers that we need to get off the carbon economy as soon as possible and so we strongly welcome this new carbon tax.

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Energy Demand Management trials

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on May 28, 2008
in energy demand management
. 1 Comment

Nissan Pathfinder Dash
Creative Commons License photo credit: navets

Energy Demand Management is a topic we have covered a few times on this blog already because we believe it will be a vital component in helping us better manage our energy resources in the future.

It is great then when you start to see utilities running successful trials of early EDM technologies. According to Francis Logan, Minister for Energy; Resources; Industry and Enterprise in Western Australia, the local energy company Western Power has run a successful EDM trial.

What Western Power did was to test the efficacy of one form of EDM called Peak Shaving where you lower the electrical requirements at times of maximum demand to reduce the ceiling load on the grid. They did so by running a summer trial where domestic air-conditioners were remotely switched off for a few minutes on hot days, resulting in a 27 per cent reduction in peak power use, without any significant loss of comfort for the home owners.

From the government statement:

“The results show that customers reduced their peak power use by 3.5kW when their device was activated,” Mr Logan said.

“This is the equivalent of using four microwaves or two pool pumps, it is a substantial saving.”

The Minister said it was the first time such a trial had been conducted in Western Australia.

“Providing non-intrusive ways of reducing energy consumption is a key to managing peak demand,” he said.

“WA’s peak energy use is primarily driven by air-conditioners, of which WA has a very high number.

In this test a switching device was installed in their refrigerative or reverse-cycle air-conditioners to allow Western Power to remotely turn off the compressor, but not the fan, for short periods of time on hot days. Switching was done six times during the trial, on days when the temperature reached 36C and usually between 3pm and 5pm.

This is a very positive outcome to the test but did not involve the deployment of smart meters as the switching was done by the utility.

Obviously a better long term solution will include easily programmable smart meters capable of controlling devices in the home based on dynamic energy pricing information coming from the grid and instructions given by the homeowner (if energy is cheap -> heat water, chill fridge, turn on dryer; if energy is expensive -> turn off dryer, turn off immersion, turn off fridge compressor).

However, rolling out a system like this will take time and money. Jeff Lee, IBM’s Asia Pacific lead for Intelligent Networks, speaking about a smart meter trial in New South Wales, said that a national rollout of a system similar to that being trialled, would require investments in infrastructure of as much as AU$100 billion dollars.

“You can’t replace the investment in electro-mechanical devices overnight. Gradually, substations will get changed to become IT-enabled. But then you have to build the communication infrastructure to do that. We’re talking about installing sensors on every light pole and on every transformer,” said Lee.

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Will airlines start weighing their passengers (and charge accordingly)?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on May 23, 2008
in transportation
. 7 Comments

Image courtesy of kpmarek
Image courtesy of kpmarek

I was on the jury of the Startup 2.0 event in Barcelona this week. I travelled with Aer Lingus as there was a direct Cork <-> Barcelona flight.

When I went to check-in on my way back, I mentioned that I only had one bag and it was hand luggage. For the first time, I was asked to weigh my bag. It weighed 13kg (28.6lb). I was informed that Aer Lingus have a policy hand baggage cannot exceed 6kg (13lb) so I had to check it in and pay a surplus of €18.

I understand that airlines are really feeling the pinch at the minute what with oil prices breaching $135 per barrel yesterday and no significant reduction in sight. And I further understand that the more weight a plane carries, the more fuel it burns but in this case, yet again, the wrong people are paying the bill.

WARNING: The rest of this post is completely politically incorrect.

I weigh around 75kg (165lb). With my hand luggage the total weight I was asking Aer Lingus to transport was 88kg (194lb). The guy sitting in the next row up from me on the plane easily weighed 150kg (330lb). Even if he had no luggage, the cost to Aer Lingus of getting him to Cork was likely significantly more than for me.

This is not an easy nettle to grasp and no airline has yet even mentioned the idea of charging passengers by their weight. Even the always controversial Michael O’Leary, CEO of low-cost airline Ryanair has made no moves in this direction.

However, with oil getting ever closer to $200 per barrel and Michael O’Leary predicting that this will “bankrupt half of the airlines flying today”, charging passengers by their weight may well become a reality sooner rather than later.

Now where did I leave that diet book!

by-sa