TH Interview: More on Intel's Renewable Energy Purchase
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 01.28.08
We had a chance to discuss Intel's major clean energy purchase with Bill Calder, Intel's spokesman. We asked him if Intel had considered generating renewable energy in-house like Google with its solar initiative. His answer: For a very large industrial manufacturer like Intel, it would not have made sense to try to do it themselves. Or at least, they could not have done it for the 1.3 billion kwh that they ended up purchasing from Sterling Planet.
Mr. Calder emphasized that Intel's goal with the purchase is to spur investment in clean energy generation capacity and increase the market for it. It is part of Intel's multi-faceted approach to becoming a greener company (which also includes energy efficiency, reducing water-usage, etc).
Intel has specified to its supplier that it wanted all renewable sources represented in its portfolio (so there's wind, solar, micro-hydro, biomass, etc), but even if they had wanted to get it all from one source such as solar, there's probably not enough supply of it right now in the U.S. to meet such a massive order.
We also asked if Intel was getting much feedback about its green initiatives. It's too early to know about the impact of today's announcement, but for past initiatives there's been good feedback from the consumer side about recent CPUs which have been more power-efficient (performance per watt) than models of the past; the dilemma is that consumers want lower-power models, but they also want more performance.
On the business and investor side, Intel has been recognized in the Global 100 List in 2008 which describes itself as a list of "the most sustainable corporations in the world". It was also recently recognized in the Davos 2008 Global 100 List, ranked at the top of Corporate Responsibility Officer Magazine's Best Corporate Citizen list for technology hardware companies and made the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 9 years in a row.
Intel hopes that its competitors will want to follow its lead, but they also think that the real benefit from such a large renewable energy purchase is to help bring down the cost of clean energy. We at TreeHugger agree that this is a good strategy; It's always more convincing to the bean counters at any big corporation to learn that clean energy is cost-effective than to ask them to buy it out of the goodness of their hearts. This is why we think putting a price on carbon would create a framework where everybody, following their own self-interest, would also help nature and the development of cleaner technologies.
Another question for Intel was: Do they have plans to go over their current 46% ratio of clean energy? The answer was a qualified "yes". At present time, it's not even sure that they could have put together enough clean energy to meet 100% of the company's needs, at least not at a cost that makes sense. But they are definitely open to increasing their ratio of clean power in the future as supply and prices conditions evolve.
We at TreeHugger love good news, and we think this qualifies. We encourage Intel to go even further and not to rest on its laurels. It now seems like the ball is in other major industrial players' court. Come on guys, lets get moving!
Do they know something we don't? Think about this: Intel, Google, and other leading edge companies think decades in advance about future challenges to their own industry. They are investing in renewable energy to preserve their business just as energy prices start to climb dramatically due to drops in oil production. They're huge consumers of electricity, so they'll be hardest hit when the crunch comes.
Intel isn't doing this to spur investment in renewable energy tech, it's doing this to preserve its own future. Nice publicity is icing.
Intels step about making multi core CPU's is good - but then again - is it really enough? Every time thie clock speed is doubled then energy use gets 4 times larger - on the other hand - if CPU speed is halved - then the CPU uses 4 times less energy.
So, if we down-clocked a CPU from 1.6 Ghz to 800 mhz then we use 4 times less power and only "lose" half the performance (that most people don't use anyway most of the day).
There is a reason why a lot of people who makes their own MP3 players for their cars or make their own server for music or video use just choose a VIA C7 CPU - it is cheap, small, requires no fan and the motherboard is very small. It also clocks up/down in speed in just 1 cycle while Intels CPU's requires 15.000 cycles to go up/down in speed.
The problem is not so much the "speed" of the CPU - it is the "perceived speed". if you have a fast CPU - but if it takes 5 seconds before it goes up to full speed from slow speed - just to make 3 seconds of fast computations - then the CPU will feel slow. While, you can have a CPU that has half the speed but if it instantly speeds up to max speed then it will be done with the very same task before the other (fast) CPU is finished.
So, what Intel could do better is 4 things:
A) Make their CPU's much faster to clock up/down
B) Make consumers informed that their motherboards suppoert both their "SUV gas guzzler"-CPU's as well as their ULV (Ultra Low Votage) CPU versions
C) Lower the prices for their ULV versions
D) Encourage their boggest customers (Compaq, Dell etc) to make their design so each customer can choose if they want a ULV version or a normal "gas guzzler" version
It doesnt matter much if Intel biuy 1.3 billion watt green energy if their mis-guided product designs consumes 20 times that amount, does it?
(300 million computers wasting 70 watt too much per hour due to CPU - 8 hours a day x 365 days a year is a huge number). In addition to this then graphics cards now use even more power than the CPU's so you can double those fogures.
I believe that the Ultra Low Voltage versions have much much lower yields, which explains why they are more expensive.
A modern CPU that uses 75 watts is pretty amazing when you think of it. Less energy than an old lightbulb allows 500 million transistors (in the case of a Quad) to do a mind-boggling amount of math.
That's why I use my idle CPU cycles to do distributed computing (folding@home).