I was interested to read a post on another of our museum blogs fresh & new in which Seb Chan refers to a quote by Nick Carr
Prickett Morgan calculates that, including secondary air-conditioning costs, the world’s PCs and servers eat up 2.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, amounts to “$250 billion in hard, cold cash a year. Assuming that a server or PC is only used to do real work about 15 percent of the time, that means about $213 billion of that was absolutely wasted.
Now that’s a lot of money and must make IT and business professionals all over the world cringe, and consultants get all excited about the work available to help businesses save this money.
But once again this is most importantly a clear indication of where the market economy has been failing as stated in the recent Stern report.
The Nick Carr article speaks entirely (with a slight reference to Greenhouse) about the economics, once again the environmental impacts are externalised and mostly ignored. Had the market economy fully costed the impacts of CO2 this so called cheap computing would never have existed (just like cheap petrol, cheap electricity, cheap water…in fact cheap anything).
According to the DEUS website, carbon dioxide production from energy generation in NSW is (my bolding);
1 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity produces 1.08 kilograms of greenhouse gas….1000 kilowatt hours = 1 Megawatt hour = 1.08 tonnes carbon dioxide per year.
A quick calculation tells us that the wasted electricity from global computing is releasing 2.295 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. (ignoring those progressive and forward thinking governments whose nations have cleaner electricity than NSW)*
Further the current European market trading price for a tonne of CO2 is €23.99 making the wasted CO2 actually cost over €55 trillion (A$99trillion) a price we have ignored for at least a decade as we pumped it into the giant CO2 credit card in the sky.
But now we are being called on our debt, more from the Stern review;
the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more.
In contrast, the costs of action – reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change – can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each year.
While all along here is a simple, effective and money saving way to reduce our personal CO2 emissions, by setting computers to hibernate sooner, turning them off more often and setting screens to turn off rather than running screen savers.
If you are responsible for a “fleet” of computers then look into shared sytems. If we considered the cost and CO2 emissions of producing the system as well as running it there are trillions of dollars in CO2 emission savings to be made by … saving money.
More importantly by taking easy steps to save the money we will be helping to reduce our footprint and the global effects of our dirty, purely Australian, high energy diet. The cash mr Carr refers to is not cold but rather fairly heated**.
Notes:
* UN stats division has world CO2 production at 24 billion tonnes, so, wasted computing power accounts for nearly 10% of world CO2 emissions.
(see also countries by CO2 emissions and countries by CO2 per capita)
**see CRC for Greenhouse Accounting:
Measuring the Impact of Greenhouse
Human actions – such as burning fossil fuels and land clearing – are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in particular concentrations of carbon dioxide. This has led to increasing average temperatures on the Earth’s surface and weather and climate changes.
Observed changes that have already occurred as a result of changes to the atmosphere include increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and cyclones, rises in sea level, changing rainfall patterns, decreasing sea ice and melting glaciers. Further climate change is anticipated as concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise. In its Third Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that the impacts of climate change will become increasingly detrimental for more of the world’s regions and systems as the extent of global warming increases.
