Zerofootprint: Black is the new green
by Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint on 12.14.06
Let's think for a moment about something we never notice - our screen savers. Around the world, right now, complex geometric shapes and patterns are bouncing around screens in empty offices and quiet suburban basements. Even when you're gone for lunch, your screen saver labors on.
If electricity were free, this wouldn't be worth thinking about. But then again, if electricity were free, the world would look very different. Very different.
The fact is, we are scrambling to find new sources of power and new efficiencies. We're spending billions to do it. And at the same time, we're using computers that quietly drain the grid.
Does this sound like an exaggeration? Let's put it this way. It takes about 100 watts an hour to run a screen saver on a graphics card. (Obviously, that's the same as keeping a 100W light bulb turned on.) Some systems will use a bit less, some a bit more. But let's say 100 watts.
Now, there are over 600 million computers in the world, many of which never get turned off. For the sake of argument, let's say their screen savers are running around the clock.
That's 60,000 Megawatts an hour. Just to keep shapes bouncing around a screen.
Just to put that in perspective, the largest wind turbines out there are rated at 10 MW.
A large coal-fired plant generates about 300 MW.
Even China's Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, which is so huge that filling its reservoir actually made the Earth wobble on its axis, is rated at 30,000 MW.
Imagine - it takes twice as much power as a generator of this monstrous scale can produce, just to avoid letting our screens go dark. It's absurd.
No one would leave a 100W light bulb on all day for no good reason. And no one would leave a screen saver on if they thought for a moment about what a waste of electricity it represents. We need to start thinking about these things. And Zerofootprint proposes getting us started.
The fact is that the sheer ubiquity of computers, and the scale of their electricity demand, amplifies every efficiency we find. If we can save millions of MW just by setting our desktops to let their screens go dark imagine what we could achieve if we looked at the whole system the same way.
Do you know what your computer is doing when you go home at night?
Let's say you're one of the people whose computer is humming long after you've shut off the lights (if you shut off the lights, that is). Your machine is sipping electricity. And there are millions upon millions of other computers doing the same right now around the world. How much electricity are they using to do nothing at all?
Enough to supply power to the Czech Republic for an entire year.
And have enough left over to charge an electric car to drive around the globe 379,000 times.
The fact is that computers use electricity, and there are about 650,000,000 of them out there. There will soon be a lot more, and every new generation of processor uses more power than the one it replaces. In other words, energy demand from computers is going to continue to rise. The cost of running a computer is quickly overtaking the cost of buying it. Just ask Google.
In itself, this is not a promising model. But it's even worse to consider that a huge part of the cost is allocated to have your computer do nothing. The cost of all this useless electricity is conservatively estimated at between $5 and $7 billion each year.
And let's not overlook the environmental cost. Idle computers contribute about 45 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. That's enough of the greenhouse gas to fill 810 billion birthday balloons.
All this to accomplish nothing.
Is it difficult to imagine 810,000,000,000 balloons? It should be easier to imagine doing something about the problem.
We know that others have recognized this colossal waste of electricity and unnecessary pollution before we did. Zerofootprint didn't just figure this out. But we'll take up the challenge. That's what we're imagining right now. We want to make all the computers in the world smarter.
After all, it's not a huge problem. If an idle computer is wasting electricity, shut it down. Your idle computer is like a 600-hp Porsche inching through downtown traffic. The car is not deploying all its power-why should your desktop? We need to find a way to get it to do its background processing and other non-critical tasks at a much-diminished speed. After all, laptops draw about a quarter of the power that a desktop does. In part this is a function of hardware. But it is also a question of using electricity more carefully, in order to manage battery life. We should be doing the same with the power that comes out of the wall.
Imagine an open-source project that allowed people to come together to write this thing, so that all the Microsoft, Sun, and Linux systems could figure out when to take a rest. Think of the billions of dollars saved. Think of the tons of carbon saved, and the power plants that wouldn't have to be built.
One of the things that's so enticing about the prospect of building software to make computers more efficient is that everybody wins. Users save money, a burden is lifted from the environment, and we will have, in effect, generated megawatts of electricity for next to nothing. That is, not using all that electricity is the same as contributing it to the grid. That amounts to generating electricity with a good idea and some smart programming.
So if you're a programmer, we need your opinion, and we need your know-how. Are you interested in joining an open-source project to reduce our computers' footprint? Then respond to this blog. We're looking for the wisdom of the crowd to sort out a bit of a mess. Talk to your friends and your colleagues. Think about the problem. Think about a solution. Let's put our heads together to do some good for the world.
[Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint]
all operating systems have power management functionality built-in for laptop users.
one of the nice features is hibernation mode: the current state of all the things you're doing (the RAM) is stored on the hard drive and the computer turns off. when you turn it back on it is all loaded back to memory and you can get back to business as if nothing had happened. no need to close everything and open them again. takes only a few seconds.
another nice feature is going automatically into this mode after some idle time (ex. 20 minutes).
there's no programming to be done, just settings to be tweaked and default values to be changed.
luckily, changing the default values of the settings of an operating system is much easier than changing the default values of our mainstream culture ;)
My screensaver runs computer models and analysis SETI@Home and ClimatePrediction.net. That's a little bit more than doing "nothing."
If everyone did that, we'd be able to put the processor cycles of these otherwise idle systems to good use.
I'm sure there's a business model in there somewhere...
Great idea. After seeing the comment created by the "XP wastes $25 billion..." thread I think the time is right to get on top of this problem. When 1kW power supplies are starting to hit the shelves you know PC's maybe getting big....but they ain't clever.
Computers are now so fundamental to modern life that that they have become an addition to the baseload. OK, some activities have given a net reduction in energy use (videoconferencing, etc.) but as your screensaver point shows the cumultive energy use is massive. Wasting power when it's not needed is just bad engineering.
Looking at all the functions my mobile phone can do now - play mp3s, take photos, surf the net, sat-nav - for just a couple of Watts max, PCs look totally OTT for most everyday functions.
The global cooling program is a good first attempt at tracking energy use. I also run a dynamic under clocking program on my Pentium M, which drops it from 2.1GHz to about 599MHz most of the time. Even that only knocks about 10W off my idle load, so there is a lot of power being wasted doing nothing most of the time.
Good luck!
Um my monitors turn off after 20 minutes, and that's the default. Most OS's have power saving options. It is up to the user to make sure they are active. Why do you want to reinvent the wheel? There are options out there like Local Cooling. Either way it comes down to the user being responsible.
This doesn't require a programmer; it only requires making more people aware of how easy it is to not only save the environment but also to REDUCE THEIR ELECTRIC BILL. (Money is a great motivator.) There are already simple solutions in place that have very similar results to what you are describing:
1) Don't use a 3-D screen saver. The "Gee whiz!" factor isn't really necessary; Window's star field simulation requires very little processing power. And I think "black screen" is one of the options, which should require no power.
2) Windows (and I believe Linux and Mac OS X as well) allow you to turn off the screen after a certain number of minutes with the screen saver running. (My home computer is set to run the screen saver for whatever the shortest amount of time is, then turn the screen off. At work, the administrators have disabled my ability to get to the settings.)
3) I've never been able to find figures to back it up, but CRT monitors are said to use more electricity than LCDs. Buying new LCD screens (and sending the old CRT screens to recycling center) should be a win for any company with more than a few computers.
4) When you aren't using your computer, turn it off. (Yes, it takes some time to start the computer, but it's really not that bad.) If possible, switch off power to the computer completely - I do this through a "power center" device that give me five switchable outlets (see http://www.pcloft.com/5unmopoce.html )
Your general argument is perfectly valid, of course - unnecessary computer use does waste energy, and should be avoided. But some of the specifics are incorrect.
1. Modern operating systems (like Windows XP and Linux) already throttle their CPUs based on how much computing power is needed for a task. Much of the time, your CPU will operate at a very low fraction of its total capacity, and will use less electricity as a result.
2. My 2.4 GHz Pentium IV system uses 80 watts when it's sitting idle (measure with a wattmeter). Running a simple screensaver, one that doesn't do anything fancy, requires so little computing power that the power consumption is unchanged. Running a fancier 3D screensaver increases system power consumption by only 15 watts. So disabling the screensaver on the computer itself isn't going to save that much power.
3. My 19" LCD monitor uses about 35 watts of power when it's on, regardless of whether it's running a screensave or not. I've been running a blank screensaver in the mistake belief that the power consumption would be less that way, but using the wattmeter I found out that the power consumption with a blank screensaver is essentially the same as with an active screensaver.
4. Setting the system to shut off the monitor after a period of time reduces monitor power consumption from 35 watts down to about 2 watts.
So it's not the screensaver that's burning the power, it's leaving the monitor and computer on that uses up the power. You can set the monitor to turn itself off after a certain number of minutes of activity, and you can set your computer to go into standby after a certain number of minutes of inactivity as well. In fact, Treehugger recently featured a free piece of software that will help people do that called Local Cooling:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/12/local_cooling_t.php
But it was characterized as unnecessary because you said it didn't do anything that people couldn't already do by themselves through the Control Panel. Well, yeah, but not everyone knows how to do that, so software that handholds them through the process might be a good thing. There used to be another program called WattSavvy from Blue Owl Technologies that monitored your computer use patterns, and then adjusted those energy parameters to optimal settings, but they appear to be out of business. So there's no need for an open source project to do this - the ability (and software) already exist.
Now I'll jump in with one of my pet peeves. There's a whole bunch of distributed computing screensavers out there, like SETI@Home, and others for climate change studies and protein folding. The idea is that they parcel out computing tasks to home PCs that they can work on when not being used for something else, supposedly taking advantage of "wasted" computer resources, and allowing computer users to donate "free" computing time to these admittedly worth causes. But these screensavers usually require the computers to run at full power, and keep them from dropping into standby or hibernation modes, which means they'll be using a lot more power than they would have otherwise. These kinds of programs aren't "free" to run - they cost the user, and the environment, by increasing energy consumption.
In the meantime if your still into this X-mas BS buy power strips for gifts and convince your family and friends to use them. Place the power strips where they are easy to see the indicator lights and easy to reach the power button
It appear my post was lost or ignored. I said the same thing, kind of.
But I do run a Cure for Cancer distributed project. I think that and protein folding is worth it. I still sleep my computer manually though.