What’s happening at www.ramsayhome.com

We found the following green stories for July 3, 2006 via Google Blog Search.

Daily green stories from Google Blog Search

Interested in learning more about Biodesiel?

Biodiesel magazine launches new website [www.renewableenergyaccess.com] : JUNE 29, 2006-To accentuate its existing publication Biodiesel Magazine, BBI International Media has launched it’s newest Web site, http://www.BiodieselMagazine.com.

Need more incentive for building green?

Building Green = $$$ [www.thingsaregood.com]: “A new study by the Real Property Association of Canada reveals that adding green features to a building equals better sale value! Rick Nevin and Gregory Watson found that people pay $10-$20 more for a home for every $1 reduction in …”

Learning to conserve from the energy-poor

Will Energy-Poor Nations (and States) Become Models for the Rest [sustainablog.blogspot.com] …: “In both places, the governments have implemented ambitious conservation, renewable energy and green building standards that they hope will lessen their dependence on imports. What really got me thinking, though, was this statement: …”

Wind energy being harvested in South America

Wind Energy Park in Brazil Starts Operating. [www.renewableenergyaccess.com]

[tags]Google Blog Search, blog, blogging, daily, internet, reviews, weblog, news[/tags]

We read this post from Andreas Schiffler on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) mailing list and wanted to share it with the readers of the Ramsay House Project. The iDC focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts. As we try to go green and build our new home with eco-friendly materials, it’s easy to forget about all the other ways energy is used in our lives.

I’d like to make a quick ecologically motivated post to the list.

It is amazing how easy it is to forget and ignore a simple fact: the Internet with all its “free” communication and information is a big energy wasting, power sucking HOG of a construction. Once you’ve read the numbers below, there can be no doubt why there is a digital divide and Africans don’t need a donation of our old PCs: only the affluent can afford to “plug-in” and operate that kind of juice-sucking machinery in the first place.

Take Google for a start: Google operates one of the largest computer-clusters on the planet, to provide us with a sub-second search result (and the ads that go with it). They run upwards of 250K servers, collectively consuming a staggering 20 Megawatts of power for a nice electricity bill: 175 Gigawatt-hours per year – almost a Million Dollars a month. And that’s just their server farm, never mind the offices and equipment that connects it to the rest of the world. — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

At the time when “Energy-Star” labels went onto most Dell PCs in 1999, the experts were discussing the total power consumption of office equipment and network infrastructure. An estimate of 74 TeraWatt-hours (TWh) per year is estimated up. The Internet barely makes a blip in the total (copiers and laser-printers are just way better “consumers” than modems), with telecommunications equipment taking about 5-10% of this total or about 7Twh/y … note that this is in 1999 and for the US only. — http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/net-energy-studies.html

A few year later in 2002-2003, the reports were refined and give a number of scenarios with interesting sounding names like “Zaibatsu”, “Cybertopia” and “Net Insecurity” which solidify a new conservative estimate to around 3.5% of TOTAL power consumption. —
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1617/MR1617.sum.pdf

Today usage is further up (as usage grows), so we can assume a conservative level of 4% of total power consumption, factor in the 4TW of US usage in 2006 and get a nice amount of 1401 TWh/year (including all the office equipment again). Thus our 5% Internet portion, is now at a whopping 70 TWh/year – perfectly in line with the 10-fold grows in hostnames from 1999 to today as reported by Netcraft. — http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

Will the trend continue. Sure it will! With more always-on-devices and entertainment platforms like the PS3 that would be considered a supercomputer just 10 years ago, we will definitely continue to use more power for our IT needs. Even though companies such as Apple like to put a positive spin on it —
http://www.apple.com/environment/energyefficiency/ — the fact is, that current hardware (CPUs, video cards and even networking equipment) will use more power. And new operating systems like Microsoft’s Vista, which will require a 3D accelerator card (the second largest power consumer in a PC) – a software move that will push for more transistors running at higher speeds on Millions of desks. Thermal design is really the primary limiting factor in microchip design today and current processors burn up as much as 100W of power when in use. —
http://tinyurl.com/rpmw4

But hey, I forgot one more thing: The production costs for all the equipment that runs the show! Its a bit like the hybrid-car-connundrum: Forget hybrids, but give me a car that lasts 5 more years – that’s green. Because on a whole, the longer lasting car will probably save more energy than driving one of the latest battery-powered gizmos would – because a lot of energy is spend on making the car in the first place. The same applies to the tech equipment: Five new computers over a period
of 10 years (28GJ) is about two-thirds of a car (47GJ) in terms of energy consumption for production. — http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19992.html

So this leaves my environmental conscience – as tech worker, full-time programmer, dare I say internet-addict – with quite a bad feeling about the whole thing and one can only hope that technological advances will turn the trend around in the near future. As an individual, I think one
can try to do more with less, keep the old stuff and live with simpler cooler-running technology as long as possible. But in the end it leaves me still a searching for practical answers … Maybe after we get this
email, we can all turn off our monitors for 1 minute (and save some power, maybe the planet). 😉

Technorati Tags: Internet, Energy Consumption, Windows Vista, Apple, Google

We are looking for fellow green builders and/or eco-friendly construction enthusiasts!

Have you always wanted to be a ‘blogger’ but didn’t know how to get started?

We would love to see more stories posted here, so we are putting out a call for contributors. If you would like to donate some spare time and share the stories you have found on the internet relating to green home building or related topics, then drop us a line. If you have an idea for other topics, posts or stories we would also love to hear from you!

No experience is necessary and we will help you get started.

Please email ramsay@ramsayhome.com if you are interested in becoming a regular contributor to the Ramsay House Project blog.

[tags]blog,blogging,daily,internet,reviews,weblog,news[/tags]