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Computer Factories Are the Energy Hogs
coondoggie writes "The main idea behind saving energy in the high-tech world has been to buy newer, more energy efficient devices, but researchers say that may be the wrong way to look at the issue, since as much as 70% of the energy a typical laptop will consume during its life span is used in manufacturing the computer (abstract). More energy would be conserved by reducing power used in the manufacturing of computers, rather than reducing only the amount of energy required to operate them, say researchers from Arizona State University and Rochester Institute of Technology."
I'm more interested in the battery life then total energy savings!
That may be true, but unless it takes more energy to produce energy efficient computers than the savings in running them, it's still a net savings.
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And of course if it requires less power to manufacture, then it is less expensive to produce. Thus the prices of consumer electronics would drop. Wait for it... wait for it.... Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh I just cracked myself up. The only difference we'd see is a little green sticker on the box where the OEM is bragging about saving the environment or something.
Better known as 318230.
If the energy is green enough then its not a issue. Bring on the Green! Nuclear Reactors. Not the ones with pumps that can fail.
Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
As a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation; a 100W computer, used for 5 hours a day, 6 days a week for 5 years uses 780kWh of electricity. At current approximate UK prices that's £125 ($200 US). If computer manufacturing uses a significant fraction of that amount of power, then there is already a BIG incentive for the manufacturers to use less. If you tell them "you should use less of this thing that costs you money!" they will likely reply "well, duh", or if current trends continue they'll say "well, as part of our Greener World Of Tomorrow Plan, we're actively trying to reduce..."
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Simple solution:
- compute the benefit of conserving 1 kWh of energy in dollars
- make sure that the cost of 1 kWh equals that amount, by adding taxes if necessary
- let the market handle the rest
I've often wondered why I never hear that mentioned when people talk about clean energy. How much energy and resources go into making a single solar panel or wind turbine? Anyone?
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All the people who upgrade their "gas guzzler" to a Prius end up hurting the environment more than if they had continued to drive their previous vehicle, simply because of the energy and waste involved in producing a new car -- regardless of whether the car energy efficient or not.
"Our new Macbooks are so energy efficient, they take even less energy to run than to manufacture them in the first place, making the lifetime energy consumption (% of total) our lowest EVER!"
The part you are supposed to care about is when you own and use it, not how it was made -- that is a matter that happens before it gets to you, so it doesn't concern you. Now, when I am saving energy, do I need to wear a green rubber band on my wrist? I've got this white one, yellow one, pink one... everyone needs to know what a great person I am.
This isn't really a consumer issue. There's no easy way for a purchaser to determine how much energy went into creating a computer, on the other hand, the amount of electricity used by the device however is easily determined and verifiable independently. Plus the purchasers pays the cost of running the machine as a separate cost, while the cost of the energy to produce the device in bundled in the purchase price. That's why people look more at how much power the computer uses (when they look at all).
Reducing the energy required to produce computers is essentially a manufacturer concern and they should already be working on that as a competitive cost advantage. I would guess it's probably not happening because most of these items are manufactured in countries that heavily subsidize their power systems and thus encourage waste by not requiring users to pay the full cost of the power they use. You want to reduce the power wasted during the production of goods? Stop subsidizing power usage and make sure the full costs are bore by the manufacturers. That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production.
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...for this arguement because it's major design feature is that it IS energy efficient because it must sometimes run off a battery, and its lifetime/replacement time is short, without charging the battery (which doesn't count since you'll get that energy back later) most laptops consume 40W, and are likely be replaced by a new laptop in 2-3 years which means lots of manufacturing for not much usage. Similar devices (desktop PCs, big screen TVs etc) cost around the same, use far more power, are used more often, are possibly used for longer and (I'd wager) might consume a similar (same order of magnitude) amount of energy to produce.
A car (while admittedly using a different energy source) with power consumption 3 orders of magitude more than the laptop, would that take 3 orders of magnitude more energy to produce?
Because in the past few years power comsuption for all mobile devices went WAY down. Also it's not a pure matter of reducing power everywhere, some places have greener energy than others. Most factories probably aren't powered by coal power plants unlike your home.
So building more durable devices and toning down our habit of replacing them every 2 years would help?
Sine it costs roughly £1 per year for every Watt of a 24*7*365 machine (and more if you have cooling costs, too) the cost of powering a box can easily exceed the purchase cost - even without playing accountancy games such as using depreciation to reduce tax liability. So if an estate of PCs or servers can be replaced by newer, more efficient hardware, the simple financial case is easy to make. That you can then also claim to be saving the planet is a nice afterthought - but that's all it is.
What's even better is if you can cite your new, energy efficient, datacentre in a country with cheap energy and cheaper staff. It's got nothing to do with saving the planet, even if that sounds nice in the annual report.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Just tax energy use more and energy use goes down. And don't forget to close the corporate loopholes.
it seems to me that with all the disposable goods we consume that we are not being energy efficient anywhere in our lives
One of the biggest issues is how often modern computers break down.
I see an awful lot of computers coming in to me that have failed due to broken connections on their motherboards. Mostly somewhere under the north- or southbridge chips, I think. Wherever the are, it is not repairable, at least, not without reflow stations and solder masks for every chip out there. Even then your return rate is going to be so high that you just couldn't do it. I don't know if it stands up to scrutiny, but I am blaming the silver-tin solders that have been forced upon us by - again - pseudo-green issues, and a general plumbiphobia. Vastly more expensive than tin-lead, and vastly less reliable - it is just too brittle, and too easy to make bad joints.
Return to tin-lead solders, equipment lasts longer, so there is less of the other toxic chemicals released in the manufacture and disposal of electronics. Net gain, and i would have less unrecyclable, 18-month-old motherboards in my dumpster.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Nuclear power is greener, but it is a far cry from "green" as in (for example) solar. Don't try to paint a false picture where nuclear is the holy grail.
I care about energy usage for one reason...battery life. A laptop consumes about the same amount of energy as a 60w light bulb. So does it really matter in the larger scheme of things? And I'd think that manufacturers are already trying to make their operations as energy efficient as possible, because it affects their bottom line.
The reason why I use compact florescent bulbs instead of conventional light bulbs is because if you replace EVERY SINGLE BULB in my entire house, the energy savings add up. But I've only got ONE laptop, so I really don't care if it's using 60w or 50w or 40w or whatever.
At US$0.10 / kilowatt hour, that would be $120 worth of juice in a new laptop. That really can't be right, so it is obvious that they are not simply counting revolutions of a power meter.
So what does it mean? Did they use the same math to figure out how many megajoules it takes to deliver a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Do you count the manufacturing energy costs in making all the equipment (circuit breaker panel, circuit breaker, wire, insulation, wall box, outlet, etc.) that delivers the power from the meter to the wall plug? Do you count the megajoules required to mine the coal, manufacture a train, manufacture a power station, and as well as thermal losses at the power plant?
Laptops don't use a lot of power anyway, newer laptops don't use a lot less power than older laptops so I am not surprised by the results. The bottom line is that if you cannot show an economic advantage to upgrading (you can cover the cost of the upgrade based on the energy saved in a reasonable time) is it probably not worth upgrading for the sake of saving energy.
Its funny how the computer / high tech industry manges to remain seen by general public as green. When we have always known its anything but. Old style smoke stack industry cranking out sheets of steel and similar is probably far less ecologically harmful than any chip plant. The other big issue is water, semiconductor manufacturing uses LOTS of fresh water which is starting to become a scarce resource too. Finally the amount of energy used as pointed out in the article all the energy use probably amounts to a big release of green house gases (if your worried about that sort of thing) at some electrical generating plant someplace.
All these highbrid cars are another good example. Cash for clunkers probably did far far more harm to our planet than any good that came from taking otherwise serviceable cars off the road. When you consider the amount of energy and bi products of manufacturing new vehicles it would have almost certainly been better for the planet for us to keep driving the ones we already made. Yes we should replace the ones we do finally retire with more energy efficient models, but its a pretty rare case the new model is so much more energy efficient it makes up for premature disposal of the existing.
When it comes to this stuff we drive cars until its to costly to keep them on the road, we use computers as long as possible, that means not getting a new one every 24 months and trying to make software more efficient so we don't need so damn many. All those unneeded animations impose a COST, they are not free.
Now none of this creates many jobs though....
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I have always been told that the same stands for cars. And I guess it is also the case for every energy consuming device.
For most purchase decisions, economics (to some degree) accounts for the amount of energy used in production. An exception is when some group tries to bias the market in favor of buying the "new, efficient" thing, even when it means that the "old, inefficient" things go to a landfill before their natural end of life.
An important, but often neglected, point to make is that energy used at the factory CAN come from more efficient, cleaner sources. Or at the very least, the energy-related pollution may be dumped a little farther from the neighborhoods you care about the most.
tldr: green manufacturing needs to be 10x cheaper than status quo to get businesses to change.
The consumer "green" movement didn't really ramp up until a combination of technological advances (for example, making CFLs not suck) and convenient market distortions (in the form of government incentives, tax credits, grants, etc.) combined to make it stupid to not "go green" with your consumer purchases. While some manufacturers have embraced the idea of environmentally-friendly manufacturing (for example, if you believe Subaru's marketing), there are not sufficient market distortions in place to make a business want to spend the capital necessary to retool manufacturing lines.
I think the fact that there is a lot of technology being manufactured in China is actually beneficial. China has the ability to force their industry to make certain changes, and they have recently started to adopt policies that are designed to make their industrial base more sustainable.
This is not news really. Embodied energy i.e. the energy used in manufacturing and distribution has long been estimated as ~80% of the lifecycle energy consumption for a range of devices such as PCs and cell phones.
The early work was done by Professor Eric Williams in his research, "Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing: Hybrid Assessment Combining Process and Economic Input-Output Methods.") The PC study was completed about seven years ago and used data a bit older than that. There have been changes in the manufacturing process, but this is balanced by increased energy requirements for having to use leadfree solder (the EU's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances [RoHS] requirement), and improved energy efficiency in the in-use phase through simple power and cost saving applications like PowerMinder.
Some large corporates are putting in place procurement criteria that relate to end to end lifecycle of their equipment from manufacturer to death and disposal - it will not be the most important factor but it is starting to appear in more and more RFPs.
The easy way forward here is to use agent-less tools that make sure your PC estate is powered down in the roughly 75% of the hours in a week that most office workers are not at work.
When people mention so-called "clean" energy they sweep under the rug any inconvenient fact.
Both solar and wind power are very diffuse, they need huge areas of land. They say, "oh, it's just desert" if you mention the fact that you need hundreds or thousands of times more area for a solar plant than for a nuclear plant of the same power capacity.
Mention how wind turbines kill birds and bats and they will say "oh, that was the Altamont pass, that's obsolete by now". They never mention how obsolete the Chernobyl plant was when it blew up.
The fact that this huge use of resources by solar and wind power plants is disregarded so cavalierly worries me a lot. What would be the impact on weather patterns if a sizable part of the desert was covered by solar collectors? Or if we collected a sizable amount of wind power? The sheer size of the systems needed to collect any significant amount of solar or wind power is something that should make us very careful.
One would think that people should be more coherent. If they were worried about the danger itself, the same people who go "OMG, it's NUCULAR! DANGER!" when anything happens at a nuclear power plant should be trying to find out everything bad that could happen as a result of using wind or solar power as well.
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This is actually a good thing. If the energy use is at a few central locations then it's easier to implement energy savings. If every computer made was an energy hog it would be much harder to modify every single one to make them more energy efficient.
No way!
It might be time to remember that mass production is more efficient than cottage industry, at-home lot production. Not that companies shouldn't try to be energy efficient, but looking at only the energy consumption of a place without thinking about how that energy is put to use is myopic.
http://www.apple.com/environment/
I mean, you didn't think Al Gore was on the board for kicks, did you?
Is what they're getting at here, is that the more "energy efficient" a computer is, the more energy required to manufacture it, therefore it doesn't matter in the overall picture whether or not your computer is the most energy efficient model on the planet, it still effectively uses the same amount of energy (or more) as a less energy-efficient model? Wouldn't this apply to pretty much everything, then? Are we just kidding ourselves, then?
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Isn't this basically the same debate that was had over the cash for clunkers program where people were throwing away an entire generation of used vehicles that still had life on them?
I could see upgrading being a problem if the computer is 1-2 years old and you're talking about recycling it (IE tearing it apart not selling it again). But when computers get to 10+ years, they are virtually useless...they cost too much to fix as parts become hard to find. They are woefully underpowered compared to the cost of keeping them running.
But in the end, compared to a vehicle, how many computers have to be made to compete for environmental impact? And then you count how many cars aren't thrown away but put into a junk yard for parts to keep other cars running.
A computer junk yard just wouldn't serve the same purpose.
Thanks for posting that.
This is why we should have one.
Comparisons like this are pointless because the "cost" of that energy is wrapped up in the price of the hardware. Moreover, the few people who might consider this a valid part of a purchase decision are the few who accept the existence of "the commons".
You spend x units on manufacturing a device which consumes y units of energy in its lifetime. what is x/y for energy saving devices and their counterpart non-energy-saving devices is the question.
Part of the problem here is EOL and the concept of Planned Obsolescence.
Maybe once there are enough demands on manufactures to keep them solvent regardless of the peaks and valleys of demand cycles they can revisit this couterproductive concept and start extending the EOL on much of the core durable goods, thereby reducing (or maintaining) current levels of energy comsumption.
Then again, that would mean essentially stopping growth, which would have a negative consequence for everyone. What a tangled web indeed!!!
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There's way too many variables in this equation. Sure I've got a desktop at work that consumes more than my laptop at work, and sure any one of the servers consumes more than both machines combined. However, careful choice of used components can yield highly efficient useful machines. Example - my fileserver at home currently has 3terabytes of capacity in the form of 3 1T discs, running of a SATA 1.5 card. The machine itself is a 21watt P3 800EB proc on an old Asus board. Throw in a 250watt 80plus power supply and that machine idles at 43 watts. My 17" screen HP laptop idles at 92 watts. The only machine I have that's more efficient is an Epia 600mhz machine, and even that weighs in at 31 watts idle. Sure the 800 isn't gonna run exchange, but at home it doesn't have to.
...again with the birds. It's not a problem now. Really. Bats, yes, that is a concern. Yes, Chernobyl was an old design. You're implying newer designs have eliminated any chance of a melt down. Really? No possibility of operator error? Did you notice that one of the major problems at Fukushima was the storage of spent fuel on site, which is standard practice everywhere because we still don't know what to do with it?
Yes, solar and wind need lots of space. We have lots of space. Not just desert, but off shore, farms, rooftops. Maybe someday we'll run out. That day is far, far away.
"The fact that this huge use of resources by solar and wind power plants is disregarded so cavalierly worries me a lot"
Really? Compared to living downwind from Three Mile Island? And what huge use of resources? Unless we build turbines that stretch from ground to the stratosphere, we'll barely harvest a fraction of the energy contained in wind. Covering the whole desert in solar panels would probably be bad, but no one's proposing that. If they do, you can join the Sierra Club and other environmentalists in trying to block it. I'm sure they'll be happy to have you on their side.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
"That's one of the reasons why a carbon tax would be disastrous. Companies will adapt to the tax and focus their efforts on more efficient production."
My apologies if that's sarcasm, but how is efficient production disastrous?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
What we need is for manufacturers to support their devices for far longer. As long as the device is functioning it is saving all that energy and other resources that it takes to manufacture a new one. It is a crying shame that Apple no longer supports OSClassic, 68K code and now PPC code. By dumping those they have abandoned tens of millions of functional machines as well as the extensive libraries of software solutions, particularly for education, small business and shareware, that ran on those platforms. Apple is a tens of billions of dollars profitable company. They should go green in a meaningful way by renewing support for the older devices and operating systems.
So why don't they? Greed. They want you to buy new equipment. They make a lot of money on new hardware.
Solution? Have a small annual fee that they charge which keeps updating. They already do this. It is called their operating system update. Just make it handle all devices to the best of the device's ability. Smart compiler builds.
The fact that more energy is consumed during manufacturing than during use is *because* the devices have been developed to be more efficient. Yes the manufacturing can be made more efficient, but once that's accomplished, the numbers will shift and again we'll be looking at trying to improve the devices' efficiency. Basically, efforts should be made to make everything more efficient all the time.