Green Wombat

photo: green wombat
Gathering at a solar-powered building on the Google campus, a host of tech giants today announced a major push to improve the energy efficiency of computers – an effort they claimed could save $5.5 billion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons by 2010. (The equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road or shuttering 20  500-megawatt  coal-fired power plants.) Normally fierce competitors – Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), HP and Sun Microsystems (SUNW), Microsoft (MSFT) and everyone – are cooperating on the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. (Apple, despite Steve Jobs’s recent green manifesto, was conspicuous in its absence.) "The reality today is that the average desktop computer wastes half of its energy – half the energy coming out of the wall plug is unused," said Urs Holzle, a Google vp for operations, at a press conference. By 2010, Climate Savers aims to make desktop computers 90 percent energy efficient and servers 93 percent. That would add about an average $20 to the price of a personal computer and $30 to a server. The alliance also will campaign to get power management software installed on computers to turn them off at night or lower their electricity usage when idle. "The fact that 90 percent of computers are capable of but not utilizing these power management technologies is startling," said Intel executive Pat Gelsinger. "This is not a technology problem. We can build energy efficient [power] supplies today. It’s a matter of industry choice."  Holzle and Gelsinger said it is yet to be decided whether computers that meet the alliance’s standards will sport some sort of Climate Savers seal of approval like the Energy Star stickers awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Climate Savers members – which also include non-tech companies like Starbucks, green groups the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as MIT and the U.S. EPA – pledge to practice what they breach, ensuring their own operations make use of power management software and install the most efficient computers. 

Ok, as important as computer energy efficiency is, it isn’t exactly the sexist green issue around – you won’t probably won’t find Darryl Hannah touting her new high efficient PC power supply. So the scribes from various daily newspapers and national magazines lured to Mountain View by the allure of the Googleplex seemed to be a bit underwhelmed by the news. But to Green Wombat, the event’s real significance – besides the obvious positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions – was the fact that once again the tech industry is out front on global warming, racing ahead of the federal government to devise a solution to ever-escalating power consumption by our digital society. Come July, the U.S. EPA will require computer power supplies to be 80 percent efficient. But the tech alliance unveiled today will begin to exceed that by next year if they keep their pledge. Contrast that commitment from computer manufacturers, chip companies and customers with the recent actions of the auto industry, which continues to fight efforts to raise energy efficiency standards of their products.

Toward the end of the event, Google co-founder Larry Page, just back from a trip to Africa, stopped by to endorse Climate Savers. "We can make great, great progress," he said. "We can also make computers better by doing this….By taking out some of the inefficiencies we can make them quieter and more reliable. The amount of power computers are using is increasing and the importance of computers in our lives is also increasing."