Jul
6
(2007)
Shut Down…
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: energy, environment. | 7 Comments
I’m going to do something today that I have never done before. Ever since I’ve had a “work” computer, starting in 1994, I’ve never turned it/them off. I’ve always left them on as personal testing/staging servers, “just in case” I needed to grab something. It’s often been handy (and occasionally essential), being able to SSH into my work system, or run test web apps on it.
I’ve never given much thought to just how much juice must be sucked up by the systems, even when left running essentially idle evenings and weekends. Apparently, this habit costs US businesses $1.7 BILLION per year.
I really don’t care about the financial cost. My portion is likely just a few pennies per day. The University can afford that.
I do care about the incremental effect this is having on the environment, though. In Calgary, much of our juice is generated by burning natural gas. So my leaving a computer on 24/7 is actually pumping CO2 into the air, and helping suck up more of the petro goo that drives this city.
So, when I leave the office this afternoon, I’m shutting down my quad G5 for the weekend. I’ll have to modify some of my automated backup scripts, which assume they can run at 3am, but that shouldn’t cause too many problems.
I’ve avoided doing the math to see how many watts drive the quad G5 + 20″ Cinema + 17″ Dell LCD + 500GB external drive + power to USB devices…
Baby steps…
Nov
9
(2005)
Peak Coal
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: energy, oil, sustainableenergy. | 2 Comments
via Peak Oil News:
In 1865, Englishman William Stanley Jevons, one of the greatest social scientists of his day, wrote an exhaustive study titled “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines.” Jevons’ argument was that England was about to exhaust all available coal resources, which inevitably would mean the collapse of the industrial enterprise upon which Great Britain’s mighty empire depended. He wrote:
It will appear that there is no reasonable prospect of any relief from a future want of the main agent of industry (namely, coal).
And:
We cannot long continue our present rate of progress. The first check for our growing prosperity, however, must render our population excessive.
So, we’ve been through “peaks” in critical resources before, only to be saved by the magical discovery of a new, “inexhaustable, for real this time, no - seriously!” resource. In the case of Peak Coal, it was oil that rescued civilization from having to deal with sustainability. Perhaps it’s nuclear (or, for Shrub: nuke-u-lar) or some other yet-unknown magical resource.
Well, actually, the article goes on to say that in response to threatening shortages of coal, enterprising companies figured out better ways of extracting what was left, and the supplies lasted much longer than expected. This is extrapolated to oil, which, in theory, could last for quite some time if we just try harder to suck every last drop out of the planet.
We could just burn off the oil in our gas tanks, party like it’s 1999, and cross whatever is crossable in hopes that The One True Energy Resource is discovered in time. It’s happened before…