Power to change: the environmental impact of computing

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#35408 9-Jun-2009 18:36

Earlier this week I posted about HP's Power to Change campaign in our Geekzone news section. This morning (5am!) a group of bloggers attended a conference call with the HP team in the U.S. responsible for this campaign and a communications channel was open that allows us to provide feedback to the team.

One of the initiatives of this campaign is a Adobe AIR-based (read: platform independent) widget that can run while you are logged in and will monitor your PC usage in terms of hours. You can then send daily feedback in terms of how many hours your PC is running every day - and in return the widget shows some update statistics in terms of environmental impact of changes, including the amount of energy saved and carbon emissions reduced.

A 2004 study for example shows that 64% of business desktop users and 24% of laptop users do not switch off their PCs at the end of the days.

HP employees are involved in this program using intranet to distribute information, updating country websites to reflect the program, distributing stickers, internal videos, and more. HP is also running a Power to Change blog.

So what's in here for us?

First I invite you to download the Power to Change widget.

Then check some of these resources:

• Main resource page on HP environmental initiatives: www.hp.com/go/environment
• Energy tips for computing: www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/education/energytips.html
• Environmental videos: www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/education/eco-videos.html

And last post here what you or your company are doing to change the way you use computing to reduce the environmental impact. Things like distributing internal information, asking employees to turn off their PCs when leaving the office, using virtual environments to run multiple servers, going through technology refreshes replacing old equipments with modern version, etc.

You can also post suggestions. Everything you post here I am happy to relay back to HP.

So, what are you doing?

UPDATE: If you don't have a Geekzone account you can still participate by posting a comment in my blog without registering.

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#223277 9-Jun-2009 19:15

I wonder how many cpu-cycles that widget uses!

The only machine I leave on is my 12Watt "pc" (modded thin client) doesn't run vista though..... http://mmsbox.googlepages.com/pc_tm5300.jpg

freitasm

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#223284 9-Jun-2009 19:35

I don't think it's too many cycles - it just keeps track of the time your PC is on.

On another note I used to run my Windows Home Server 24/7. I also had a couple of virtual machines running at home - including my own Exchange Server. Since the Geekzone upgrade I've moved these two virtual machines to the datacenter, which allows us to shutdown the Windows Home Server at home.

We noticed quite a good reduction in our power bill since then. And most of the times we only turn it on for backups and when watching some media over on the Media Center.

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#223405 9-Jun-2009 22:54

Well I for one will not use this widget; seems pretty useless to me and more importantly - a waste of resources (oh, the irony).

Sure, one person using it might not make a big difference, but 1000s of them downloading it and sending data to and from the server, plus don't forget that most people don't have Adobe AIR installed- so that's an additional ~15 MB download = more wastage.

For such a simple app, it seems silly that one has to use AIR. It could have been easily coded in C++ and ported to other platforms without much ado.

Plus, take that website itself. If they were really "green", they wouldn't have made such a heavy flash-only website. That site took a while to load even on my 8Mbps line. Can you imagine how much energy is being wasted just by visiting that page?

My point is, if you really want to be green, don't fall for these marketing gimmicks - you're only wasting more resources.

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#223422 9-Jun-2009 23:52

Adobe, ew.... possibly the largest form of CPU load in the world!

Think about it, PDF, Flash, all those embedded "update checks" and of course all those web-developers whom offload server processing load to the usually far more power inefficent end-clients.

It's amazing what I have squeezed from that little 12W linux box, and that's with a hard drive.

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#223437 10-Jun-2009 02:15

Trying to put my halo on but going slightly OT , I've got hosting in a solar powered data centre... Also use a laptop my main computer with max 100W on the psu. I see ICONZ have carbon Neutral power - Meridain I guess? but talking to Nate the other day, green data centres will happen here when people demand them.

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#223452 10-Jun-2009 07:44

paradoxsm: I wonder how many cpu-cycles that widget uses!

https://h30470.www3.hp.com/html/faq/faq_WidgetCalculations.html#8

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#223453 10-Jun-2009 07:46

d3Xt3r: My point is, if you really want to be green, don't fall for these marketing gimmicks - you're only wasting more resources.

The resources are a one time only download and an application that will then monitor - and remind you - of your own impact when using computing power.

What I asked is what are you doing?

If not installing the widget is your action, that's good. But are you doing anything else? Your company? Do you turn off your PC? Do you run multiple virtual machines instead of multiple physical servers?

Do your company implements a energy efficient policy?

Do you check the energy rating on your appliances when you buy those? Do energy rating impact on your decision to buy one model or another?

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#223454 10-Jun-2009 07:48

Another thing I've done: Geekzone used to run on a smaller server. Since moving to a bigger server we managed to run five virtual machines on a single hardware.

This allowed us to unplug the old server - it not only reduced our energy utilisation but also reduced the colocation costs.

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#223472 10-Jun-2009 08:42

While we are on the topic I saw this a couple of weeks back - figures are from google so hardly impartial, neither do they disclose their methodology but still an interesting comparison:

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/05/carbon_footprin.html

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#225768 17-Jun-2009 10:24

An interesting read on this subject: Windows 7 and Power Management.

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#228182 25-Jun-2009 09:37

A kiwi initiative, not related to HP, but in the same environmental mindset is AcornHQ.

One of the guys from Ponoko decided to create a website where people can donate to plant trees in the New Zealand South Island, to offset the carbon emissions from iPod and iPhone devices. They also have tips and tricks on how to use these devices efficiently from an energy point of view.

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#231706 6-Jul-2009 16:57

to all those nay sayers out there i suggest you all download a copy of The Great Global Warming Swindle and watch it. It certainly changed my point of view about us as the primary source of global warming it also goes to show that when you can throw enough cash at something and bury the facts you don't want known then it becomes real easy to push the proverbial up hill

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#231712 6-Jul-2009 17:08

^ So by that statement, are you implying that we shouldn't care about pollution, about reducing energy/resource consumption, etc?

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#238625 24-Jul-2009 14:22

I will probably run this on my home computers just to see how bad I am at leaving them on. But I have to take issue with the argument that downloading a copy of 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' will add anything to the debate about making good environmental decisions around the house.

That particular documentary is a divisive piece and even a cursory internet search should lead to the conclusion the argument it made isn't exactly water-tight.

If people choose to do nothing to save the environment that's there choice. But to use a deliberately polemic documentary to make that call is, to my mind, a cop-out.

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#240029 29-Jul-2009 08:29

I see there aren't much interest in this topic... On talking to HP about this program I got the following numbers of registered users:

China               6530
Brazil               3923
United States    3085
Mexico             1282
Australia            649
New Zealand       213
Argentina             80
Netherlands          75
Nigeria                  8

Good to see New Zealand on the top countries - but is it good? To keep up download the Power to Change widget.

The question that surfaced in our discussions was "what's more important to customers: power or 'green'".

When you buy a computer, do you look at how "green" it is, or how much power (as in CPU, memory, PSU) it provides? In other words, if you have two similar computers on a store shelf, would you look for the greenest one - the one made with recyclable components, made in environmentally friendly companies, and so on?

How important is a product being "green" in your decision process?

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