When I started writing this blog series at the beginning of the week, one of my posts was going to be on the effects of those wall bricks, warts, or other euphemisms for the power adaptor that powers numerous pieces of equipment in your home and office.

These units use power whether the DC power they are providing to the device is being used or not, and much of that disappears as heat (something you'll know if you've ever picked one up while it's on).

The problem is that these things have become a vital part of any type of electronics -- from the PSU in your desktop computer through to your laptop, speakers, printers along with mobile phones, PDAs, cameras and all sorts of things in between.

When I started writing this blog series at the beginning of the week, one of my posts was going to be on the effects of those wall bricks, warts, or other euphemisms for the power adaptor that powers numerous pieces of equipment in your home and office.

These units use power whether the DC power they are providing to the device is being used or not, and much of that disappears as heat (something you'll know if you've ever picked one up while it's on).

The problem is that these things have become a vital part of any type of electronics -- from the PSU in your desktop computer through to your laptop, speakers, printers along with mobile phones, PDAs, cameras and all sorts of things in between.

When I started writing this blog series at the beginning of the week, one of my posts was going to be on the effects of those wall bricks, warts, or other euphemisms for the power adaptor that powers numerous pieces of equipment in your home and office.

These units use power whether the DC power they are providing to the device is being used or not, and much of that disappears as heat (something you'll know if you've ever picked one up while it's on).

The problem is that these things have become a vital part of any type of electronics -- from the PSU in your desktop computer through to your laptop, speakers, printers along with mobile phones, PDAs, cameras and all sorts of things in between.

The average data center uses the equivalent of about 2 tons of coal (or 80 barrels of oil) per day; a datacenter with 2,500 servers uses enough electricity in a month to power 420,000 homes for a year. A 30,000 square foot data center with 1,000 racks needs $4.2 million a year to power and cool the computing processing power you are using (including maintenance and amortisation costs).

Those figures are from HP, Sun, the Carbon Trust and Forrester Research, and make disturbing reading.

The result the of last example would also generate 44,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere; in the EU you can offset that using the Emissions Trading Scheme, but it would cost you an additional 700,000 Euros to do so.

The average data center uses the equivalent of about 2 tons of coal (or 80 barrels of oil) per day; a datacenter with 2,500 servers uses enough electricity in a month to power 420,000 homes for a year. A 30,000 square foot data center with 1,000 racks needs $4.2 million a year to power and cool the computing processing power you are using (including maintenance and amortisation costs).

Those figures are from HP, Sun, the Carbon Trust and Forrester Research, and make disturbing reading.

The result the of last example would also generate 44,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere; in the EU you can offset that using the Emissions Trading Scheme, but it would cost you an additional 700,000 Euros to do so.

The average data center uses the equivalent about 2 tons of coal (or 80 barrels of oil) per day; a datacenter with 2,500 servers uses enough electricity in a month to power 420,000 homes a day for a year. A 30,000 square foot data center with 1,000 racks needs $4.2 million a year to power and cool the computing processing power you are using (including maintenance and amortisation costs).

Those figures are from HP, Sun, the Carbon Trust and Forrester Research, and make disturbing reading.

The result the of latter example would also generate 44,000 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere; in the EU you can offset that using the Emissions Trading Scheme, but it would cost you an additional 700,000 Euros to do so.

I was reading the September 2006 issue of Fast Company last weekend, in which there is a really fascinating article on the effect of the Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb (CFL) and Walmart's hope to sell one of these lightbulbs to each person in the US (you can read it online: How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're Looking At It.).

CFLs provide the same amount of brightness as a standard incandescent bulb, just use less energy - for example a CFL of 15W is equivalent to an incandescent of 60W in terms of brightness, it just uses a quarter of the energy.

I was reading the September 2006 issue of Fast Company last weekend, in which there is a really fascinating article on the effect of the Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb (CFL) and Walmart's hope to sell one of these lightbulbs to each person in the US (you can read it online: How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're Looking At It.).

CFLs provide the same amount of brightness as a standard incandescent bulb, just use less energy - for example a CFL of 15W is equivalent to an incandescent of 60W in terms of brightness, it just uses a quarter of the energy.