Last week I caught up with Raj Maniher of Baw Baw shire council in their Smith Street Community Development office that council is renting in Warragul. Raj has implemented a number of measures to cut energy use in the office, and has achieved a 30% electricity saving. Some of the measures implemented include: Insulating the ceiling Double glazing using “magnetite” on some of the windows. Getting internal reflective blinds made up by a local blind maker. Very ingeneous! Voltage reduction … read more
City Switch program launches the City Switch Workbook – showing tenants easy ways to save energy
This morning the City of Melbourne, City of Port Philip and Sustainability Victoria launched the City Switch Workbook. This workbook shows tenants 9 easy steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Brett Muncton (City of Melbourne) and Jake Hallas (Sustainability Victoria) gave a entertaining demonstration of how the workbook can be used. The photos above and below show them demonstrating delamping (step two in the workbook) and setting up power saving settings on a PC (step six). Written … read more
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Halve the energy use of your LCD monitor
Computing equipment continues to get more efficient, and with LED monitors now available at good prices, there is even more opportunity to save energy. Good power saving settings should be a given for any computer installation. However as you upgrade your computers there are now many ways to save energy. You can switch to laptops or thin client computers. And a new way is to make sure that your next monitor is backlit with LED lighting. LCD monitors usually have two cold-cathode fluorescent lights … read more
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What will make zero net energy office buildings affordable by 2020?
A zero net energy office building is one which consumes no net energy. Its an office that uses very little energy, then has some form of renewable energy to generate all the power it requires. With current off the shelf solar technology, presuming little or no shading, its possible to get around 100 kWh of energy per year per square meter of solar panels at latitudes of around 40 degrees, more in sunny locations at lesser lattitude. For a single storey building, with a roof covered with solar … read more
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You have SPAM with a huge carbon footprint
You may have come across this news item a couple of months ago but it is worth taking another look. Although, the study was conducted by a major spam-ware corporation, it is clear that junk e-mails have a huge carbon footprint. (image: www.fotolia.com) Anything powered by electricity emits greenhouse gases. Recently research was conducted in the US to find out the amount of energy needed to transmit, process and filter spam globally. The results were startling. According to the ‘Carbon Footprint … read more
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Standards that ensure your new IT purchases are energy efficient and have minimal environmental impact
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. 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, … read more
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New technologies that will halve your computer energy use – interview with Stuart King, Dell Australia/New Zealand
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 … read more
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The Climate Savers Computing Initiative
The Climate Savers Computing initiative aims to reduce computer energy consumption by 50% by 2010. Organisations on its board of directors include Dell, Google, Intel, HP, Microsoft, CSC and WWF. It has hundreds of members, all committed to purchasing energy-efficient PCs and servers for new IT purchases, and to broadly deploying power management. The CSC website includes case studies on deployment of aggressive power management across entire organisations, and a range of guides for activating power … read more
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Virtual desktops provides large computer energy savings and are becoming easier to deploy. Great for schools and offices!
Virtual desktops provides large computer energy savings and are becoming easier to deploy. Great for schools, universities and offices! Most of the time only a small fraction of a computer's power is being used. If you took a office or school with say 100 PCs, with an average load of say 15%, in effect 85 of the PCs would be redundant if it was possible to take advantage of the full power of 15 PCs across 100 work stations. By employing “thin client” or “virtual desktops” this is made possible. … read more
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Voltage reduction could save 15 million tonnes of greenhouse gas – part 2
A few months ago I wrote a blog posting about how tighter regulation of electricity supply voltages could save Australia 15 million tonnes of greenhouse gas a year. However a comment on that posting suggested that voltage reduction may not result in any useful savings. Below I report on the results of an experiment we undertook to identify how much power can be saved, if any, by operating equipment at a lower voltage. We measured a variety of single phase loads at different voltages. A variable … read more
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