Bill Thompson’s article “The Offline Cost of an Online Life” describes how the technology we use is affecting the amount of energy we consume. On Wikipedia, for instance, the home page has 13 images that load when the page is viewed, an “inefficiency (that) costs 5000 kwh (kilowatt hours) per year, or around 2000kg of CO2.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7300403.stm
The basic premise – once you know how much and in what manner you are consuming energy, you can go reduce energy consumption by managing your resources better or perhaps just turning things off. Thompson thinks we need “a super-smart meter that can calculate how much power is being used serving my web pages, hosting my Facebook profile, running my Second Life avatar and, of course, dispatching my messages to my Twitter friends.”
May 7, 2008 at 9:48am
Saabira Chaudhuri