Craigslist recently launched their official blog.
One of their first posts offered some transparency into their energy consciousness:
“Serving 10 billion page views on a few hundred servers, craigslist leads the internet industry by orders of magnitude when it comes to efficient use of electricity. The last time I checked we were clocking something like 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.
Compare this to single digit thousands of pages-per-kwhr for most large sites, which typically run tens to hundreds of thousands of servers.”
We think it’s great to see them not only doing a great job in conserving their energy use but also in making it common knowledge and hopefully resulting in some friendly, competition to raise the bar on this issue all around in the Internet industry.
Electronics in the United States should have a UL (Underwriters Laboratory) tag on them somewhere, in Europe, it’s the CE tag.
Guess how much electricity your computer uses and then take a look at the tag and see what the maximum power consumption is.
Power is measured in Watts, W (Watts, Volts and Amperes are always capitalized since they are named after people). Sometimes, on battery-powered devices, the power is not stated, but the current (in Amperes or Amps) and the potential (in Volts) will be. In this case, you multiply the current (in Amperes or Amps) with the potential to get the maximum amount of instantaneous power your device uses (in Watts). Typically, cell phones use 3 to 5 Watts and laptops use 35 to 50 Watts. Coffee makers are typically 900 Watts. Wow.
When you use power for a duration of time, you can determine how much energy has been used. If you use your cell phone at a power level of 5 Watts for 1 hour then you have used 5 Watthours (Wh) of energy. A battery’s capacity is how much energy it holds.
Take a quick gander and count up the amount of power you are using right now. You may have to catch the refridgerator if its running. You can also split that up between your housemates. Honestly, it will take some real effort to determine how much power you use at any moment, there is a lot of power that was put into making the products in front of you. This is okay, as long as we are aware that our power and energy usage and continue to clarify where it comes from and educate our selves to the direct and embedded energies that fuel our lifes.
Right now, my direct power use is about 100 Watts (two computers and a cell phone) and its daytime so I don’t need to worry about lighting and the alarm clock by the bed is on but I don’t see it. I’m sure Im not counting everything, but I’m getting closer.
In 1998 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology issued its vision for each person to live under 2000-Watts, the current average in the United States is 12,000 Watts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Watt_society
There is a new design paradigm emerging, one that replaced the brute-force method of getting it done. In the past, adding more power or energy meant getting more functionality (more gas give more speed). Now, the elegant design challenge is to get more functionality with less energy (go farther with a hybrid-electric car with regeneative charging from breaking). Where does this lead? All the functionality with no to minimal energy. This is beauty.
And, this is enegy awareness and it spreads. Electrical power is political power. Know your power and energy.
