Slashdot Mirror
Feds Unwrap $15M For Corporate Energy Reduction
As hard as it is to imagine, coondoggie writes with news that the federal government just unveiled a new energy bill that will offer $15 million in assistance to retailers who help to build and adopt energy-efficient technologies. "The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the first phase of $15 million awards to retailers Best Buy, JCPenney, John Deere, Macy's, SuperValu, Target, Toyota, and Whole Foods Market. Commercial Real Estate Firms such as CB Richard Ellis, Forest City Enterprises as well as the financials groups also saw some of the money. Along with the money the companies will have access to the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to design, build, tune and operate at least one new prototype building and to retrofit an existing building project."
Imagine if they received $699 billion more.
...should harness the smug of their customers.
Well we reserve that kind of money for folks who fail upwards..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
WHY do we need incentives to do the "right" thing?
Why are we beholden to evil, unless someone pays us to not be?
{sarcasm} I guess I'm just too stupid or naive to understand {/sarcasm}
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Cos I thought they only talked in billions and trillions. Y'know 700 billion here, a trillion there.
Deleted
Fifteen million dollars is trivial.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The simple solution is to let the sun in. 1) Install more sky lights. 2) install sensors to dim lights as needed
Next solar HOT water systems for heating/cooling of their buildings.
This is 30 year old technology with a 6-8 year payback.
Where is my check?
$0.20 per KwH.
computer using 100w (your net admin should have power settings set correctly and this is way over estimated)
for 15 hours
= $0.30 per night
or
PHB @ $30/H
taking 5 minutes to boot and log in ($30/5 minutes of time (12))
= $2.5
Doesn't make sense or cents to a business.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
This is offtopic but screw it, it needs saying. I'm sick of anonymous asshate like the parent poster defending the sociopaths who caused the necessity to save the country.
That money didn't just go away. It went to extremely rich people.
You're not going to solve the problem by rewarding the people who caused the problem in the first place. We need some serious banking regulation in this country, starting with a cap on interest rates at some multiple of the prime. Outlawing golden parachutes.
The government isn't going to bail me out, but you want it to bail out the people who have the means to bail themselves out? Smartassed comments are needed a whole lot more than bailing out uber-rich sociopaths. Ever hear of Will Rogers?
"No bonus" boxes checked.
Free Martian Whores!
Your PC is 200-300 watts (another 150-250 if your monitor is a CRT), but your laser printer is 2,000 watts. Your printer uses more electricity than a dozen PCs.
A photocopier uses even more electricity.
Free Martian Whores!
Here's an idea: Why not just shut down and lay off all the employees and open up shop in India or China where they still build power plants?
I've heard this argument from people within my company. It didn't take must to shut them up though. Under most bios setting, you can set a time for the computer to auto-boot during the week.
.$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.
People start work at 8am? Set the PC's to boot at 7:50. Some people show up a little early, change the boot times.
Within the OS settings, if there isn't any use within 120 minutes, have the system hibernate. Also, our CAD workstations consume ~300 watts an hour. At those levels, overnights and weekends amount to a fairly substantial amount of waste (and waste heat) generated.
At that level of consumption, each system consumes
It would be markedly easier, and less annoyingly "nickle-and-diming" to just use whatever centralized management setup you almost certainly already have at any decent sized outfit to just do scripted shutdowns or hibernation on idle. If users hate turning on their computers that much you can also have a scripted wake-on-lan go out 5 minutes before the start of the workday.
We do that at the tech department I work for, and it works fine. It would be much more work to track and punish users who leave their machines on, besides being wildly annoying for everybody involved. There are definitely nontrivial energy savings to be had by shutting stuff down when it isn't needed; but a mess of cat-herding user coercion is not the best or easiest way.
What does Congress have to do with it? The bumbling CEOs who run their corporations into the ground deserve all the credit.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Here's the Washington Post take on the vote:
"It's no coincidence then that of the 205 Members who voted in support of the bill today, there are only two -- Reps. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Jon Porter (R-Nev.) -- who find themselves in difficult reelection races this fall. The list of the 228 "nays" reads like a virtual target list for the two parties."
Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/09/the_failure_of_the_financial.html?nav=rss_blog
Umm, you do know with sub prime mortgages, it's about the rich people/companies GIVING out their money to keep a lean on an asset (ex: a home) and with the housing market vastly undervalued, the value of the asset is less than the cash given to the previous owner.
You do know that the sub-prime tag given to this is to blame the poor people for the faults of the rich, right? The rich bankers chose to lend money to people they thought couldn't afford an increase in interest rates because they assumed the housing prices would continue going up. The poor would sell or be forclosed on for a gain. The percentage of the problem that are the sub-prime mortgages is smaller than the non-sub-prime. But the sub-prime ones were first, and it's a great tag to stick on the problem to shift blame.
The rich white bankers are the cause of this, and it's the poor blacks that are blamed (just read the racist stuff about equal opportunity loans being thrown about if you think there aren't people blaming minorities).
Learn to love Alaska