today I want to post about something less specific, but way more important (not that my other posts would be meaningless, but they are sometimes really specific) than I usually do; it’s the energy consumption of all the devices around us that we use often.
my topic in this context has of course something to do with computers, but I also want to write about other important aspects that allow us to save some power ant take care of our environment.
about computer energy consumption
like a lot of technical equipment, computers need way more energy nowadays than they did let’s say 5 years ago. why has this to be this way? cpu’s today need around twice the power they did then. you can see this on this power dissipation page on wikipedia. let’s compare an intel core 2 duo e6600 (which is the cpu i’m using in my pc right now) and a pentium III with 1.266ghz. the energy-consumption raised by factor 2.
“but a core 2 duo is way faster than a pentium III” you may think. that’s true of course, but when we compare a pentium 4 with a core 2 duo, we can see that more performance can be done and still power can be saved.
what is way more extreme than the raising power-hunger of CPUs is the consumption of graphics cards. while graphics cards which were high-end 3 years ago did only need the power they got via agp they now have two extra pci-express-power-connectors and they dissipate around 100 watts in idle because the chip has a huge amount of transistors built into it. this xbit-article lists the consumption of of geforce 7 and radeon x1900 chips. here’s a newer article by tomshardware about this topic. as we can see, the newest cards need way more power than the ones in the xbit-article.
the question is: do we really need the newest hardcore gaming hardware, and maybe if we do, can’t we use another machine for the easier jobs like web browsing, receiving e-mail and so on?
I do it like that, my gaming machine (core 2 duo e6600, geforce 8800gts) is only used for gaming and video transcoding and so on. chatting, surfing and things like this are done on my notebook, which uses around 24 watts when I do the usual stuff.
about cars and public transport
with cars it’s not much different than with computers, except that a car needs way more power, so the effect on the environment is stronger. also, the energy a car uses is mostly (talking about gas and fuel) more “dirty” than the power the computers use. however the evolution of cars isn’t that different from the ones of computers (in the aspect of power consumption, of course).
nowadays we can build an engine with a given power way more energy-efficient than in the past. but is this done? no. people do rather want bigger cars, like tanks that need way more fuel and pollute the air stronger.
and what’s even worse: they don’t even care. that’s where politic fails today. cars that are unnecessary big and heavy need to be more expensive. it would probably be the best to raise the costs of fuel and put this money into environment protection, as it is intended with the co2 fee (german). this way it would be possible to charge the ones who are responsive for the CO2 production and not anybody or people who do already take care of this. and it would also motivate people to use means of transport that are less destructive for the nature.
another point where we see that political influence in environment protection isn’t strong enough is the following: 1.3 million trucks drive trough switzerland each year (german), most of them trough the gotthard tunnel. why? because it is cheaper than the transport on rails. but it needs way more oil and energy to drive a truck trough switzerland than to drive a train the same route. as we can see, oil-related goods are still not expensive enough.
about blogactionday
even if I wanted to write about the problem with our environment for a long time, I always forgot about it or didn’t take the time to do so. now there’s a really nice project (my girlfriend told me about) called the Blog Action Day that encourages bloggers to write about the environment on a given date. I think it is a really nice idea, and so I participated.
I think your post is very interesting and you did a lot of research. Especially the part with the big cars is very important. Every time I see such a car on the street, I ask myself how stupid people can be and why they just don’t care about our environement. Also why the politicians think, they don’t need to pass a law for these cars.
Maybe they will care in a few years, but then it’s probably to late…
Btw, I also wrote a post about our environement. Follow this link:
http://tatle.wordpress.com/