David Jones, the bureau of meteorology’s head of climate analysis, as reported in the the Age, said earlier this week that temperature benchmarks for August had been broken in every state and territory. ”In duration, extent and the magnitude of anomalies it is beyond historical experience and it hasn’t finished,” he said.

See full article at the Age newspaper.

I find this very disturbing. It appears that climate change is happening very quickly, reinforcing again the need for urgent action to cut emissions.

Melbourne water storage levels (courtesy Melbourne Water)

This week the weather is not what we expect for winter. Melbourne is known as a place of changeable weather, so I can’t recall a winter where we have had 5 or 6 nights in a row of strong winds. In Brisbane the temperature was 32 degrees Celsius yesterday. Its winter for goodness sake!

So are we going to look back at this time as a period of climate change or the start of climate change? The science seems quite clear. Unless we can quickly slash the amount of greenhouse gas being generated by human activity, the climate will continue to change. My young children may never in their lifetimes know what it is like to live in a stable climate.

The famous Dr Seus children’s book The Tale of the Lifted Lorax finishes by saying “unless someone like you cares an awful lot…”

Unless we get global emissions reduction quickly, 2009 will be viewed historically as a year back in time where people started to notice that the weather was changing. Unless we quickly stop putting great amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, stabilise, then reduce atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases people won’t be looking back and saying “2000 to 2030 was the time where the climate changed quickly.”

Think about this next time you make or support a decision that results in greenhouse gas being generated somewhere.

Most commercial buildings in Australia have moved away from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents, which are much more energy efficient and last longer. The limitations of CFLs are slow warm up time, early failure if frequently switched, and high cost for dimmable CFLs. Additionally some speciality bulbs, such as chandelier bulbs, don’t have readily available CFL equivalents. But as CFLs are four or five times more efficient than incandescent in our energy audits we always try to build a strong case for switching to CFLs.

But incandescent may be getting a second life. Australia enacted the first legislation banning  sales of low efficiency lamps (incandescent) and the US followed. With a much larger market than ours this has sparked some innovation in the design of incandescent lamps.

Philips now has a incandescent that is 30% more efficient than a standard incandescent. Osram is shortly coming out with one 25% more efficient.

These sort of efficiency gains still leave CFLs as clearly the superior option, but as there is more research undertaken the incandescent could get even better yet.

If incandescent efficiency can be improved by 20% a year, it will take six or seven years to catch up with where CFLs are now. Which is a long time, unless there is an innovation that provides a quantum improvement in efficiency.

LED lights on the other hand are now getting close to CFL efficiency.

Its great to see all this lighting innovation happening, and hopefully we will soon see screw in and plug in bulbs that are more efficient than CFLs

When your IT equipment is due for upgrade it’s the perfect time to greatly reduce your computing energy use. But how do you know what products to use?

The US EPA Energy Star standard is now the defacto standard for energy use computing equipment. This certifies products as either being energy star compliant or not.

Energy Star logo

This is now a quite stringent standard, with version 5.0, the latest version, coming into force on 1 July 2009. The standard takes into account the power used by computers when off, in standby mode, and when in idle mode (that is when on, the operating system has loaded, and activity is limited to basic system applications).  Each mode is weighted according to an estimate of the hours per year the computer will be in each mode.

For example to be energy star compliant a category A desktop computer (your typical office computer with a single core processor) would need to use say less than 2 watts when off and in standby mode, and 39 watts or less in idle mode. Most desktops we measure when undertaking audits consume more than these threshold limits. A similar category A notebook would need to use say less than 1 watt in off and standby modes, and 13 watts or less in idle mode.

Thin client requirements are similar to laptop/notebook requirements.

The Energy Star (5.0) standard covers five categories:

1. Desktops, Integrated Desktops and Notebooks
2. Workstations
3. Game Consoles (under development)
4. Small Scale Servers
5. Thin Clients

So a simple way to maximise the energy savings from your next computer upgrade is to specify that ALL equipment (desktops, notebooks, thin clients, servers) be Energy Star (5.0) compliant. Or if your upgrade isn’t happening for a year or so, to the most recent Energy Star version at that time. You can see full details of the standard at the Energy Star website.

And of course if you are currently operating desktop computers seriously consider thin clients (which will cost no more, but greatly reduce your energy use) or notebook computers.

The Energy Star site includes a list of products that are available internationally, and not just in the US.

In conjunction with the Energy Star site you can also use the EPEAT website, which assesses products against a range of sustainability criteria including:

• Materials selection
• Design for end of life
• Product longevity/life cycle extension
• Energy conservation
• End of life management
• Corporate performance
• Packaging

The EPEAT site lists products available in 40 countries, including Australia. It is a program of the Green Electronics Council, a charitable not for profit organisation. EPEAT is a green electronics certification system. The list of EPEAT certified computers in Australia is pretty small, so if you have a preferred vendor who isn’t on this list I’d encourage you to ask your vendor to get their product EPEAT certified.

Computers continue to get more powerful, but are they using less power? This afternoon I interviewed Stuart King from Dell Australia/New Zealand. Stuart talks about how computer power use is coming down, discusses the Intel vPro technology for power management, thin client computing, and how you can greatly reduce computer power use at no cost. Click here to listen to this interview which looks at how computer technology is advancing. This interview is particularly recommended for anyone in the process of upgrading their computers - the perfect time to achieve some big energy savings for your organisation.