Magical thinking
One of the aspects of the present-day environmental movement that gets up my nose is the tendency towards magical thinking that many of its followers engage in; notably, the belief that because doing something about climate change (and environmental degradation and peak oil and the whole dismal litany) is better than doing nothing, any particular something they can point to clearly must be done, however irrelevant it might be to dealing with the underlying problem. It generates make-work, an annoying wheel-spinning tail-chasing pursuit of distractions, at the cost of grappling with the very real and very serious problems we face. And when it's not based on numbers, advice about how we ought to tackle our power problem can actually be counter-productive, as Professor David MacKay of Cambridge University's Department of Physics points out. (Long article, that, and well worth reading — and the draft book on energy policy that it links to.)
I'm particularly exercised right now by the suggestion that we all ought to be unplugging our domestic appliances that run on "standby" mode, waiting to be activated by remote control, rather than leaving them sucking electricity the whole time. Take these folks, for example:
So many electrical items around the home have little 'standby' LED lights these days. Indeed it's shocking how much energy they use as well (apparently around 90% of the power needed to run the appliance - so there's another 'saving money' issue for you!). Does everything in your house really need to be permanently on standby? Plugging and unplugging electrical items is the work of but a moment and can make a difference to the environemt and your bank balance!
Er, no. Just how much juice does a standby appliance consume, really, and how much would we save if everybody in the UK religiously turned off appliances they weren't using? Let's try and come up with some numbers.
The first point I'd like to note is that, contra the well-meaning assertions of Shropshire Green Party, devices in standby mode do not all consume 90% of their maximum power drain. Take the laser printer sitting on the other side of my office; it's rated power drain in standby is 11 watts, but when in operation, peak drain is around 700 watts. It's a few years old; modern appliances tend to be a lot more parsimonious with their standby draw. Ditto items like LCD televisions or VCRs and PVRs; newer ones tend to run on single-digit watts when in standby, primarily to keep the infrared receiver powered up (so that they can come fully to life when you hit the "go" button).
The next item on the green hit list is items like mobile phone, PDA, or iPod chargers — wall warts, those blocky transformers that everything seems to come with these days. They're often warm to the touch; doesn't this mean they're consuming lots of power? Well, no. You'd be surprised how little power it takes to keep a small transformer warm; a couple of watts will do it, over time, because they've got chunky lumps of metal inside that hold heat efficiently, and they don't get hot enough to dissipate it through air convection -- so contact with your hand is the most effective way of cooling them. Typically we're talking 2-5 watts. (If it was on the order of 100 watts, you'd know about it — you'd burn your hand as soon as you touched the thing, just like a halogen spotlight.)
Now. Let us consider that there are about 15 million households in the UK. Let us postulate that each household contains no less than twenty such wall-warts or gizmos with a standby mode that could stand to be unplugged. How much juice can we save?
Taking as a rough guestimate five watts of standby power consumption for each device, multiplied by twenty, we get roughly 100 watts per household. That's not insignificant; it's equivalent to 2.4 kilowatt-hours per day, or about £0.25 in electricity. The same as leaving a single incandescent light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. Multiply by 15 million houses and we have 1.5Gw, the output of a full-sized power station. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?
Yes, but: the UK's total power generation capacity is 40-60Gw (it varies over time), with a base load of roughly 40Gw. The base load is the power it takes to keep the country running all the time — its permanent power draw, basically. The best case for everyone turning off all their standby-mode devices all the time is a saving of 3% of the nation's base load. But that's equivalent to us not using these devices at all!. In practice, some of these devices are going to be in use for quite a lot of the time; for example, it takes a few hours to charge up a mobile phone or a laptop and they need charging at least once a day if they're in use. Other devices simply won't be turned off; given the headache of reprogramming your VCR when you first switch it on, are you actually going to unplug it? The real saving from the 'disconnect your wall-warts" campaign will be considerably less.
Moreover, electricity generation accounts for about 30-40% of the country's energy budget — it has virtually no impact on transport (only about 33% of the railway network is currently electrically powered). So we've saved, at a maximum, by completely turning off these devices, maybe 1% of our total base load power consumption. The true figure is probably considerably lower.
Now for the human cost of the plugging/unplugging gizmos, which for some reason the proponents of power parsimony never seem to talk about ...
It's like spam. Deleting an individual spam email takes a second or two. But given how many millions there are per day, it soon adds up.
It takes me roughly 10 seconds to disconnect a wall wart. I include in this the time it takes me to walk to the room it's in, locate the socket, identify it, and unplug it. It takes me the same time to plug it in again. Assuming one switch off/switch on cycle per day per wall wart, it therefore should take a household with ten of the things (see the normative assumptions above) 200 seconds per day, or just over 3 minutes. Multiplying this figure by 15 million for the participating households, and the human effort of observing this quasi-religious ritual is 3 billion seconds per day, or about 90 man-years, spread across the nation!
Valuing each person-year at a notional £20,000, each day we do this it costs us £1.8M, or two entire productive working lives. Another way of looking at it; using this costing technique, we lose 700 productive working lives per year, or the equivalent of £1.4 Billion in worker-productivity for the time spent turning wall warts on and off.
In other words, it's a lot cheaper just to buy another nuclear power station.
You may think I'm being unfair. Why not put all the wall warts in a house on one power block with a single switch, making it easy to turn them on and off? Well, if we do that we can reduce the cost by an order of magnitude. But it's still the same as the cost of a new nuclear power station, amortized over 7-8 years (rather than the 40-50 year running life of the plant).
The "unplug your standby gizmos" movement is trying to get us to observe a superstitious ritual, rather than contributing a practical measure to reduce the nation's carbon emissions. It will in any case be obsolete in the next few years, as gizmos with really low energy standby modes are mandated by law — so you'd be saving milliwatts rather than whole watts.
Back during the second world war, there was a drive in the UK to strip out railings and send pots and pans to metal works to be melted down and turned into weapons. It was seen as a patriotic duty; if you had railings outside your home, you weren't doing your bit for the war effort. Did this actually help the war effort? No it didn't; the total weight of railings and pans melted down for scrap probably wouldn't have built a single cruiser. But they kept urging people to do it anyway, because it made the public feel as if they were contributing and helping deal with the national emergency. It was, in other words, good for morale.
Trying to defeat global warming by unplugging phone chargers and gizmos with a standby mode is in the same league as sending your kitchenware to be melted down to make tanks; it's silly.
Want to save energy? Have a shower instead of a bath; heating water consumes a huge amount of energy. (But don't use an electrically-heated shower — it's much more efficient to use gas or even oil fired water heating.) Work from home, or find work that's close enough to home that you can commute on foot or by bicycle or bus. Turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees in winter by all means. (The rate of heat loss through a wall is proportional to the temperature differential across the wall — in other words, the cooler your house in winter, the more slowly it'll lose what heat it retains.) Switch from driving an SUV or a truck to driving a small, light car, and go easy on the gas pedal.
But unplugging wall warts? That's just plain silly.
Comments
The Thatcherite Syllogism:
Something must be done
This is Something
Therefore, this must be done
People want magic bullet solutions. "Turn off devices in standby mode" is easy to explain, and (modulo discussion above) doesn't affect your life that much. "Change jobs so you can bike to work", on the other hand, takes lots of effort. The problem is that all the things that actually make a difference are precisely like that: unpleasant and effortful. Which, unsurprisingly, is why the problems don't get solved much. People, and I include myself in this, are really really bad at dealing with the "litter problem" -- if just one person drops litter, it doesn't actually matter that much. The tragedy of the commons and Schneier's stuff about externalities are all part of this sort of line of thinking; I've never seen anyone come up with an actual way of dealing with it rather than just identify that the problem exists.
Posted by: Stuart Langridge | June 22, 2008 1:40 PM
I think you're being a bit disengenuous yourself Charlie (hey, it's your blog, you're allowed to *grin*), while I broadly agree with some of your points (such as the wooly thinking and the "about 90%" claim being used to tar all products), I feel you're missing a few issues and glossing over others.
Some old devices undoubtably do very inefficiently use 90% of full power when in "standby", some of these are also probably in service, the question then becomes: is it "better" to replace the inefficient item (with all the resultant cleanup costs and the cost of production of a new "more efficient" one), or is it better to educate the owners on how to use it so it isn't wasteful?
Again, yes the low-energy standby modes ought to happen and they'll gradually filter through, but it's best if that's at a normal rate of replacement from wear and tear rather than scrapping a nation's worth of otherwise perfectly fine gizmos, which is waste on a mammoth scale.
Writing it off as the cost of a nuclear power station is also reducing things simply to their monetary cost, nuclear isn't "clean" energy by any stretch of the imagination, it's just moving the environmental costs into a different area that has become "less scary" to the public than CO2 emissions. Long term storage of spent nuclear fuel is still like landfilling plastic rubbish: "out of sight, out of mind, maybe we'll figure it out what to do about this stuff before we run out of places to bury it."
Unplugging devices that you don't need is really only part of the point though, the real point is that you're only plugging them back in when you need them... and face it, I'm sure there's been at least a few people who've unplugged all their devices because of this, and then found that there's two or three things that they actually never plug back in again because they don't actually use them anymore, and hadn't really thought about that fact.
I know it's definitely happened to me and I'm quite aware of my "appliances".
Posted by: Sam | June 22, 2008 1:56 PM
Sam: yes, I'm over-stating it to some extent. (Example: when I go on holiday I make a point of doing the turn-everything-off dance, and turning down the fridge, and so on. Because? A few weeks of spurious power consumption is a whole different matter from a few hours.)
On the nuclear waste disposal topic I have other things to say, which I didn't say here. (Nutshell version: the problem goes away if we stop trying to bury it in our own back yard and come up with a multinational framework for putting it in the most appropriate places on the whole planet, instead. And, oh, if we start actually working on using the stuff rather than simply piling it up.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2008 2:10 PM
If there are electrical appliances that use 90% of their power in standby then the campaign should say "Some items use lots of power on standby, why not find out what they are and turn them off thereby saving you money and the world resources", rather than "Turn off all appliances!".
As to the issue of nuclear waste, the solution, in my opinion, is pretty easy. All nuclear material is natural, we didn't make any of it, it's just dangerous because we put so much of it in one place at one time. So to dispose of it, just spread it all back out again. Fit a couple of large ships with grinders and set them to pootle about the oceans grinding up and dropping off small amounts of radioactive material as they go. The background radiation level won't change, no 3-eyed fish will be born, there won't be any dangerous large chunks of radioactive junk about.
Of course, no-one will like the idea, it sounds like we are polluting the environment, but all we're doing is redistributing the stuff we concentrated in the first place.
Posted by: Hal | June 22, 2008 2:11 PM
I'm into energy-saving and renewables and stuff, and you're right about this one. I favour turning off items that don't have a clock or need retuning, but the figures I see bandied around are just silly. My digital recorder, for instance, uses about 1 watt on standby. We won't win the argument by saying things that are easily disproved.
I disagree about the nuclear power tho.
Posted by: Susan Francis | June 22, 2008 2:44 PM
Hal @4: actually, we did make some of the radioactive waste. (You need to read up on neutron activation and transmutation.)
On the other hand, the high level waste is, by definition, the stuff that's decaying fastest, with the shortest half lives. And storing it for a couple of centuries -- or even a millennium -- isn't rocket science; it's pyramid science. (See? We've got an existence proof for how to build structures that could contain a chunk of radioactive waste for 1-5000 years; just stick 'em in a desert, preferably tectonically stable, and drop a half million tons of pyramid on top of them.)
The biggest problems with nuclear power are (a) the common association it shares with nuclear weapons (a whole different ball game) and (b) the nuclear power industry, as it currently exists.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2008 2:50 PM
Hal @ 4: Sure, spread it around, no-one will notice. We spread CO2 (and other more toxic) emissions from coal-burning power-stations around a fair bit once we realised that the smogs were getting hazardous to our health. Then we "found out" that even spread out across the atmosphere of the entire planet, it still adds up if you're building it up faster than it's broken down, and then Bad Things happen.
Charlie @ 3: Getting the reactors built in the first place is an exercise in overcoming NIMBYism, I don't want to think of the "man-hours" involved in doing it on a global scale for the waste. Might be easier to get people to turn their gadgets off instead. ;) No, I'm not entirely serious.
I do wonder if there's a hidden agenda at play though: if we get people to feel understand that they need to be more efficient in power use and that it comes at a cost to them (effort to turn things off), then maybe they'll be lazy enough to say "Yes please, anything to save my back from bending over any more!" when they have the planning consultation about building a wind-farm next-door.
Posted by: Sam | June 22, 2008 2:55 PM
According to Mackay's own figures, you're overstating the drain from phone chargers drastically - http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/charger/
There's also the association cost of advocating measures like this. Nearly everyone can see that turning off phone chargers is a bit silly and doesn't help much; the same people who advocate that advocate all sorts of other things that might well help a lot; if one's debunked, the other one tends to go with it.
Giving people a single specific task to do (ie. don't take that flight. Yes, that particular flight you were looking up just now) ends up being a lot easier than trying to change our general behaviour.
Posted by: Sam Kelly | June 22, 2008 3:12 PM
Okay, so the "standby equals one or two power plants" my environmentalists bring forward is pretty much true. I agree that unplugging everything is quite uncomfortable, but where is the problem with
a. bring the industrie to producing machines that consume less and less in standby mode (11 Watt is pretty much, 2-3 Watt is much better),
b. use plugs with switches where possible (e.g., for my PC I have a switchable plug; with one switch the PC standby and the monitor standby are gone).
And of course you are right that one should look at the efficiency of energy saving proposals. But a movement towards household appliances and electronics that consume less power is something quite sensible, given the proportions of power consumption (1/3 households as a rule of thumb, IIRC).
Posted by: Till Westermayer | June 22, 2008 3:25 PM
Yes, the waste disposal problem has long been 'solved'. What kills me is that this is a _fantastic_ opportunity to make money. If I were living in one of the surrounding communities in Yucca Flats, I'd have no problem with storing nuclear waste there. And I would band together with my fellow residents to demand a hefty fee for doing so. A real hefty fee. But the Magic Capitalists of America haven't figured that one out yet . . . Anecdotally, I don't think the younger folks have the superstitious dread of the stuff that their parents and grandparents do.[1] Given the necessity, it's only a matter of time until the young-bloods demand more nuclear power.
I don't blame the DFH for this irrational fear, btw. They simply don't have that much power, and never had. I blame the giant spiders and the evil mutants that are the inevitable results of inadvertent exposure to radiation.
Posted by: ScentOfViolets | June 22, 2008 4:02 PM
I'm an engineer in a manufacturing environment, and did a similar analysis on shutting off equipment as part of the end-of-shift shutdown procedure. The calculated cost in worker-minutes didn't show much benefit. My manager pointed out that in this case the worker-minutes didn't count, as workers are integers rather than floating-point. Unless we added another person to the payroll, there would be ZERO real additional labour cost, and the savings would be pure profit on the bottom line.
Posted by: Troy | June 22, 2008 4:12 PM
A better campaign would be to get people to turn off their PCs, or at least set them to go into sleep mode. I know a bunch of people who just leave them running all day and night.
Some places have a reason for doing this -- my employer runs updates at night and backs up to a central server. But there's really no reason for personal computers to be left on all the time...
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 22, 2008 4:21 PM
OK, it might not be a good thing in summer, but in winter that waste heat isn't wasted. Especially not if you have a properly insulated house. It's not the most efficient heat source, perhaps, but calling is waste is misleading.
Secondary heating?
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 22, 2008 4:33 PM
And of course, observance of these rituals is a nice visible way of sorting the Us from the Them. Same old story. I wouldn't be surprised if the True Believers get (more) violent over the next couple decades.
And the point that really chafes is that the religious observers AREN'T the ones who solve the problems for good and all -- the orders of magnitude better solutions come from unsuperstitious rationalists who you can bet aren't doing the wall wart dance. In fact, the ability to actually solve problems and the unwillingness to do tribal dances are the same thing.
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 22, 2008 4:34 PM
Charlie, I'm with you for the first half of the article. I bought a power meter to check how much my devices use in various modes and only one or two use more than a watt in standby - basically our old CRT TV and the cable TV box. What is much more important is for people to switch off equipment they aren't using, such as PCs at night or lights when you leave a room. [BTW, I suspect that the energy that went into making the power meter is more than I've saved as a result of using it].
As you say, the industry is making improvements in this area. I spoke last week at an ITU symposium on ICTs and Climate Change; the telecoms representatives were all full about how much they were doing in this area. (BT were awarded a Queen's award for sustainable enterprise).
I don't agree with your reasoning about people's time and another nuclear power station. Perhaps I'll revisit this idea when more than 90% of the world's electricity is produced by "low carbon" means. For now, I think the important point is that this advice about standby mode has reached the stage where people repeat it without checking the figures. It's even taught in primary schools.
Posted by: Dave Berry | June 22, 2008 5:00 PM
Andrew G - there's no need to leave business PCs on overnight to do updates. "Wake-on-LAN" technology (or pre-programmed start times in the BIOS) can be used to switch the kit on when the server is ready to download updates.
In UK higher education, there is an exemplar project at Oxford Uni implementing this sort of thing across the campus. They expect to save £250,000 a year in electricity bills as a result. Search for the JISC "Low Carbon ICT" project for more details.
BTW, about six months ago you recommended I read "Domino" by Algis Budrys, as an example of someone who was writing about internet-like information flows during the 1960s. Thanks for that, I enjoyed it.
Posted by: Dave Berry | June 22, 2008 5:05 PM
but, but, but, if we turn off all the PCs at University, our @home-scores (Einstein, SETI, folding) are going to go down! bad! *SCNR*
Posted by: Michael (Eye) | June 22, 2008 5:21 PM
Charlie, great post. However, I'd take issue your premise re: "global warming" statement. This hasn't received a lot of press, but the data now show that there has been zero net global temperature change across the past 11 years, in spite of steadily rising CO2 levels. See http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/warming-on-11-year-hiatus/
For what it's worth, I'm a strongly left-leaning, biodiesel car driving socialist, but also a scientist/engineer very familiar with pathological science, and very skeptical of the AGW arguments & data.
I'm definitely in the minority among my other lefty friends.
Some of my other liberal friends are on record saying "it's ok to over-hype the dangers of global warming and lie to the public, as long as good results from it". When I point out that this is the same Straussian logic that the US's xian right/neocons uses, it seems to fall upon deaf ears.
One of my non-sheep friends jokes "If buying a Prius is so good for the environment, why not buy two!" I think Carbon Offsets are the new indulgences..
Posted by: xmd | June 22, 2008 5:41 PM
Water conservation is power conservation. Withdrawing water, treating water, moving water, and treating wastewater all take a lot of juice.
It should show up on your water bill, but the water co. usually "borrows" from infrastructure maintainance so your rates don't go up during politician X's tenure. Let the next gen deal with leaky pipes...
When your neighbor is watering his sidewalk DURING THE DAY, he's pushing SO2 right into your kid's lungs and mercury into her food.
Conserve water, dammit! Is that so hard to understand?
Posted by: theDAWG | June 22, 2008 5:44 PM
Michael - this is debated seriously among University IT staff, because BOINC and Condor systems can do a lot of useful computation. The full calculation has to include the "embedded energy" used to create and install the PCs in the first place, an analysis of the benefit of the computation, and comparison against the cost of providing the compute power elsewhere.
It often uses less electricity to run this sort of task overnight on PCs rather than on dedicated compute clusters, because the dedicated clusters have airconditioning, UPS's and other equipment that uses more power again than the actual servers, whereas the PCs just sit in offices. It's quite possible (even without Wake-on-LAN) to schedule these jobs to run and then shut down the machines when no jobs are left in the queue.
As Charlie says, it's all about working out the actual numbers. Whether a given Uni would regard SETI@Home etc. as a worthwhile task to support is a matter for that organisation to decide.
I apologise for taking such a boring approach to your comment!
Posted by: Dave Berry | June 22, 2008 6:08 PM
(See? We've got an existence proof for how to build structures that could contain a chunk of radioactive waste for 1-5000 years; just stick 'em in a desert, preferably tectonically stable, and drop a half million tons of pyramid on top of them.)
Yes, but all except one of the prototypes got ransacked.
Posted by: Ed | June 22, 2008 6:41 PM
xmd: This hasn't received a lot of press, but the data now show that there has been zero net global temperature change across the past 11 years, in spite of steadily rising CO2 levels.
This one has been thoroughly beaten to death. 1998 was a particularly hot year (due to El Nino) so the trend looks flat since that year. 1999 and 2000 were colder so the trend since them looks a lot steeper.
For example, see this graph:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/trend1.jpg
from this page:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/giss-ncdc-hadcru/
Looking at the overall data, and realising that there is random variation on top of the underlying trend, it's really difficult to understand why anybody would think that the temperature is not continuing to increase.
Posted by: Ed | June 22, 2008 7:00 PM
You're not alone over there Charlie. May I quote from my hometown newspaper, the Seattle P-I:
"According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, "The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon ... emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.""
That's right, they were seriously proposing to ban bonfires on a city beach because of the impact on global warming. Sigh....
Oh and if people are so worried about the electricity they consume, move to lighting with compact fluorescents which take about 1/7th the electricity for the same illumination. Replacing all of your incandescent bulbs with those will make a much larger impact than unplugging items taking a few watts to remain on standby.
Posted by: rick | June 22, 2008 7:15 PM
Interesting. I think there's a resource argument that chargers should be standardised to avoid as much as possible the ridiculous proliferation of specialised transformers and connectors which have useful lives of only a few years, maybe a decade or two at best. Douglas Adams IIRC had a big gripe about that.
What would be an interesting idea, given the low amounts of power required is encouraging mobile phone companies to bundle solar or hand crank chargers as an alternative. I'm sure I could charge all the batteries I need using solar energy for most of the year, but it's just not simple enough to make the change when I get a wall wart bundled in my box. Perhaps taking these small elements of power off grid first would also encourage better energy usage too.
I also wonder why we're banning tungsten lamps before disposable batteries which would surely be a better victory.
Another way would be to start using power consumption ratings on phones themselves, it's notable that the latest Symbian s60 feature pack seems to lower power usage dramatically enough to reduce the size of battery required in the next generation of the Nokia N-Series, and now that people are far more conscious of their energy bills they're more likely than ever to adjust their habits when buying new equipment.
Posted by: Alex Ingram | June 22, 2008 7:32 PM
xmd: further:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/4/175028/329
I should have thought of checking there before making my previous reply. They have answers to most of the "sceptical" ideas so are well worth a look in these sort of cases.
Posted by: Ed | June 22, 2008 7:59 PM
rick @23: I've already gone the CFL route -- the only incandescent bulbs in the house are ones that are waiting to burn out and have CFL replacements sitting in a drawer, ready for the day.
An interesting point is that if an economy measure is going to save enough power to show up on the electricity bill, most people will make it voluntarily, and pat themselves on the back -- not for being a good environmentalist, but for saving money. (See also: the 38% drop in year-on-year sales of large SUVs in the US over the past year. It's not because of environmental concerns, it's because of gas costing $4 per gallon. Compared to the US $9 per gallon it is hereabouts ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 22, 2008 8:19 PM
One nit to pick; that 90% figure they pulled out of their ass (and they did, I'm pretty sure that's not the right figure) refers to the total power consumption over time. ie, you cell phone charger sits idle most of the time drawing a few watts for the wart and is used for a few hours once or twice a week, meaning it's standby draw is x% of it's total power use.
That said, technological solutions like the are far more sensible than daily supplications to the gods.
Posted by: Michael Kirkland | June 22, 2008 8:25 PM
Ed # 21 Looting generally occur within one generation of the closing of tombs, because people have a good Idea what's in them, or they hate the dead guys guts. Other than that you need a culture light nosey enlightenment scholars with the idea that something 'good' is hidden in side to engender tomb robbery.
As for the railing/pan propaganda: The raw materials didn't get as far as the smelters. The railings were buried and the pots where made of a very soft aluminium alloy. We used a set of pre ware pans years that went oval through casual handling so you had to give them a good wack before you could fit the lid on. I guess with enough care and attention you could cook up a decent structural alloy from pan soup.
Alex # 24 Here's a scuzzy piece of detail. Wandering through the 3rd world end of Brick Lane Market today there were guys selling? random phone charger cables amongst the dodgy handsets, porn and tired charity shop reject clothing. What kind of market forces does that suggest.
Posted by: maggie | June 22, 2008 10:29 PM
I don't believe that consumers have the power to significantly change the amount of CO2 our (world) society produces. I could conceive that we could slightly change the rate at which our society produces it, but I think it will carry on producing CO2 at around the current rate or faster until someone very powerful takes draconian measures to stop it. This intervention, if it happens, will be motivated by observed costs of global warming, and our saving a bit of power now will only delay the intervention.
While I'm being negative, I don't see how transformers' containing big lumps of metal could make them feel any warmer. In the long term, the heat out of an idle transformer is equal to the energy in.
Posted by: Tom Cooper | June 22, 2008 10:37 PM
I measured it for the setup I'm currently sitting in front of. 24W when its all supposedly turned off.
So now its got a radio control switch on the plug in the wall which not only cuts the power without any effort at all, but also kills those damned power LEDs that otherwise annoy by lighting up the house.
Sure, its not in the least as important in energy terms as anything connected with heating, but its 105kWh a year with the added advantage of the blinkenlights effect when you press the radio control button to turn it all on again.
Posted by: Ian Smith | June 22, 2008 11:07 PM
Oh ghods, I've created a monster...
Posted by: purphecthulhu | June 22, 2008 11:45 PM
Charlie, my phone charger doesn't pull anything. I have four things that are standby -- the microwave (which, since I don't keep the time on it, I should start pulling), and three powersquids. One powersquid has only it's own LED on standby (has recliner and lamp on it all the time, sometimes also shredder or heating pad). The other two go to computer stuff and TV stuff. I could certainly unplug the computer powersquid when I shut down for the day, but I *do* shut down, so it's just the powersquid LED and the LED of the speaker that stays up (I used to turn it off, but Giorgio knocked the control speaker off the desk so often that now it's very tricky to get it to turn on). So there's not a lot there, either. I'm not unplugging the TV powersquid -- it takes 20 minutes to retune, redate, and retime all of the things attached to it, plus, I frequently tape shows when I'm out or asleep.
I do leave a 4w CFL on in my bedroom after dark/before I go to bed so I can be sure there's no cat in the way and it's bright enough to do everything except read. There is also a nightlight over the litterbox because one of my cats is going blind and she had trouble finding the litterbox. I sure hope she can handle it when she loses all her sight.
theDAWG @19, our city uses smoke tests every year to find leaky pipes.
maggie @28, the feds had some SF authors in to talk about how to keep people away from dangerous areas centuries in the future. I recently reread an excellent Robert Reed story, The Dragons of Springplace, that has another idea -- put a new unbreakable glass all over it and weapons, etc., to make a giant plateau and on the top all the plants are poisonous, all the animals are poisonous or will kill you (the genetically-modified komodo dragons now have five-foot heads), the water is poisonous, and all the insects are poisonous. I looked to see if there was a free version of the story and didn't find one, but the collection it headlines is for sale on eBay. Here's my review, which is not too detailed.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | June 23, 2008 12:58 AM
I did measure the standby power of everything in my house with a plug in meter and found it was about 70 watts or about 1.7 kw a day. About an eighth of my usage. The worst offenders were the two computers and the two printers. Computing devices accounted for over half of all standby power.
Cheap home printers have external transformers and use around 5 watts when turned off or on - unless turned off at the socket. The mobile phone charger suggestion is a waste of space, but one targeting home computers and those disposable printers would appear to make some sense.
No need for a daily ritual though, timer plugs are dirt cheap, draw no measurable standby power and are much more reliable than humans at turning things off at unnecessary times.
Posted by: John B Stone | June 23, 2008 1:03 AM
Most people are not engineers. Most people don't make decisions rationaly, we make them in the context of our own beliefs about ourselves. If you start by suggesting that people should change their entire lifestyle to avoid a vague, future problem, then most people will put it in the 'too hard' bucket.
The arguement that doing something is better than doing nothing is based on the idea that doing something makes people feel enabled. They can take baby steps and find their feet, start thinking of themselves as responsible global citizens, without suddenly sprouting dreads and herding lentils. Once they've done that, they can get on with actually reducing emissions by [insulating their houses|not flying|less meat|less driving|changing their whole lifestyle].
Of course, that's the theory. I don't know if it works or not, we'll have to leave that to the behavioural psychologists to find out.
Posted by: Jez Weston | June 23, 2008 1:55 AM
Ah, the "Politician's Fallacy". I first heard of this formula (something must be done...) via http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/26/1763692.aspx
Posted by: Mike | June 23, 2008 4:03 AM
Charlie @26, I hope you read the fine print on the compact fluorescent light bulbs. They contain mercury. Not bad when one person dumps it in the trash, but everyone?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7431198
Is this the next environmental emergency? What to do with all those nasty CLF's.
"There was an old lady that swallowed a fly..."
Posted by: John/4 | June 23, 2008 4:31 AM
hmmm. Am I doing something for the environment if I don't use the electric light in my bathroom when I go to the toilet during the night? The reason is that the charge-indicator LED on my electric toothbrush is so damn bright it almost gives me headaches on its own. yay!
Posted by: Michael (Eye) | June 23, 2008 9:40 AM
John @35: yes, I am indeed aware of the mercury problem. But this is probably the last generation of CFL bulbs I'll own -- LED bulbs are already available (if you don't mind paying £30+ per bulb) and that's the technology that'll render the CFL bulbs obsolete. At which point the whole concept of lamps with disposable bulbs will go out the window, as the LEDs should be good for 30 years ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2008 10:21 AM
Charlie @ 26 & 37 .....
CFL lightbulbs are a giant con.
I refuse to have them.
They are DIM, they can flicker - and this can be VERY dangerous, especially if the flicker-frequency is 7.3Hz or a multiple thereof.
What ARE efficient, and COLD, and bright are LED bulbs.
Soon, they will (I hope) become the standard, and not the Hg-containing, flickering monsters, that WON'T EVEN FIT some of our existing light-fittings, because the bloody things are too large and clumsy.
A typical example of politicans (mostly lawyers) fucking-up a TECHNICAL decision.
And DON'T start me on why only 33% of our rail-system is electric, either .....
Posted by: G. Tingey | June 23, 2008 11:05 AM
ed @21: I bet the pyramids wouldn't have been ransacked if the curse of the pharoah actually worked. Make people start dropping dead as soon as they get to "reception" and they will take notice.
I suggest a healthy coating of arsenic dust in the access corridors, or maybe lighting provided by a couple of lumps of vitrified high level waste '-)
Posted by: dave b | June 23, 2008 11:08 AM
G. Tingey,
I have a combined ceiling fan / light fixture in my living room* that was fitted out with CFLs by the previous owner. I keep them in the fixture out of a certain amount of environmental guilt, but almost never use them, because the color is simply awful, a sickly yellow-green that might not be out of place in an abode of the Old Ones.
Charlie's right about LEDs, they're a much better solution in terms of efficiency, life-time total cost, and amount of hazardous material (yes, there's nasty stuff like arsenic and such in some of them, but in very small quantities compared to the amount of mercury in CFLs). I'm not convinced about that 30 year lifetime; as I understand it we can't yet get ten years reliably out of mass-produced units. But that will come with time and engineering.
* Which now needs to be replaced anyway, as the fan has died. We're trying to find one that works well, looks nice, and fits the style of our house (mid-20th modern). Not so much luck so far.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | June 23, 2008 11:42 AM
Actually, there's a fascinating book (by, IIRC, Gregory Benford -- in non-fiction mode) on the problems of communicating across deep time. Benford and others (scientists and futurologists and archaeologists) were invited to join a brainstorming process to work out exactly how the KEEP OUT signs at Yucca Flats should be designed ... to remain readable across upwards of ten kiloyears and a postulated total collapse of civilization including a loss of literary and linguistic continuity with the past (i.e. us).
They agreed up-front that the symbolism should be targeted on human beings (it's unlikely another intelligent tool-using species will show up before we go extinct), and then began working out how to design a vestibule that would push the WooWoo buttons hard for just about every known and imaginable human society. (Start with lots of skulls ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 23, 2008 11:43 AM
Woah, fascinating. Here's Part One of Benford's Deep Time - Ten Thousand Years of Solitude. See Dick Run From Radioactive Death ^_^. Plenty of classic SF references in there, too.
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 23, 2008 12:21 PM
charlie@41 - I seem to remember an article on this in new scientist at some time over the past few years - a tough problem. brings back (fond) memories of "the mote in gods eye"...
CFL bulbs - they are not a con. cheap ones can flicker, or hum. this is not good, but the ones made by decent manufacturers are usually fine. to get the right colour of light, pick the right bulb (the colour of a bulb is measured as the equivalent temperature of a lump of metal (steel?) so an orange looking bulb is cool (700 i think, measured in kelvin), because a lump of steel would be relatively cool to glow orange. a bulb that is blue ish would be hot (1100K i think) because you would have to heat a lump of metal to a higher temperature to get a whiter light from it.
Light bulb manufacturers will soon have to accept back the old lights when they blow, to recycle them. this is newish legislation that may already be in force, if not then over the next year (european).
LEDs are indeed better than CFL bulbs, and I would love to light my house with them. they are expensive tho - but if you buy them in component form, and you have the urge, it's easy to cobble something together. you can buy small 3-LED stick on lights for a £5 from B&Q. good for mood lighting but you would need lots to light a room.
anyway, the carbon trust has a lot of good publications free to download (www.carbontrust.co.uk). Mostly geared to industry and business, but this technology tends to start there and then work it's way to the domestic side of things.
as to the "unplug NOW" argument - technically it doesn't do much, individually. large scale, maybe a small impact (2 nuclear power stations, or coal fired equivalents may not be massive in the global scheme of things, but in the local scheme of things it certainly is). what i think this is about, is awareness raising. I do some work for the carbon trust, and a reasonable amount of the savings a business can make (generally 10-20%) is changing how they think about energy. Individually, turning things off. as an organisation, an energy policy, eg in procurement, throughout the business. generally how things are done - think about energy from the start, and you can often significantly cut down on consumption and emissions. Monitoring what you are doing, then setting targets and making improvements. this all adds up (kWh, CO2, and most importantly for my clients, in money).
In order to get through the declining oil supply, as well as global warming, we need to get our act together. that's only really going to happen when people in general start thinking about how they live their lives and relating that to energy. getting people to unplug things may not make a massive difference, but it gets them started, gets them thinking.
Posted by: accelerationista | June 23, 2008 12:35 PM
Disposing of high-level radioactive waste.
ASSUMING that keeping it around, in case we think of a better use for it is a bad idea, that is .....
Simple.
Make up deep-penetration shapes, of about the same size and dimensions as a GRAND SLAM bomb, but optimised for water.
If necasseary fit them with small, reliable, cheap one-shot electric propulsion units.
Point them at any handy subduction trench, thus sending the radioactives back where they came from.
End of problem.
Why has no-one thought of this?
Posted by: G. Tingey | June 23, 2008 1:22 PM
I think there's a resource argument that chargers should be standardised to avoid as much as possible the ridiculous proliferation of specialised transformers and connectors which have useful lives of only a few years, maybe a decade or two at best. Douglas Adams IIRC had a big gripe about that.
ISTR the Chinese government wanted to standardise on mini-USB for mobiles a couple of years ago. I recommend and endorse this.
Meanwhile, I note that the charger for my E65 doesn't heat up perceptibly through being plugged in, although the phone does quite quickly charging. Draw your own conclusions.
Posted by: Alex | June 23, 2008 1:35 PM
A couple of months back, one of the NPR "Morning Edition" commentaries had the rather depressing notion that nearly all of the "feel good" measures we might make here in the West along these lines were completely abrogated by the industrial output of just two rather small-but-growing cities, one in India and one in China.
Both are going full-bore into industrial production, via coal-fired power plants. The estimate was that the output of greenhouse gases from these two cities alone would exceed any savings from all of our trash recycling, fluorescent light bulbs, hybrids, etc, etc.
We understand that China is planning to bring one new coal-fired power plant per WEEK online for the next decade or so.....
Posted by: M. Werner | June 23, 2008 3:47 PM
Regarding your comment at the end about going "easy on the gas pedal", that could be interpreted in ways that actually increase gas usage, not decrease.
If you mean less speeding, then yes, that will decrease gas usage.
If you mean accelerate slower, that actually increases gas usage. It is better to accelerate quickly to the speed limit. See also this interesting article on a device to help teach drivers how to conserve fuel.
It'd be better to say go light on the brake - anytime you are using the brake, you're wasting momentum you built up using gas. It's more fuel efficient to slow down gradually, even better if the light changes before you get there so you avoid stopping entirely.
Posted by: LeBleu | June 23, 2008 3:52 PM
I have an alternate suggestion for the best way to post keep out signs that will work for countless millennia.
Use non-Euclidean geometry in your design to deter casual visitors, install a really big Flying Spaghetti Monster puppet for religious symbolism, and sink the whole thing deep in the ocean to restrict site access.
I think this might have come up somewhere before though.
Posted by: AH | June 23, 2008 3:52 PM
Charlie: "It was, in other words, good for morale."
Don't underestimate morale. Even a silly ritual might be useful in reinforcing a consciousness about not wasting energy that might spill over into doing more meaningful things, like buying a fuel efficient car, insulating the house, etc, etc. Purely speculative, I know, but perhaps worth considering.
Now I trust you have planned your vacation on a low carbon emission basis? *wink*
Posted by: Alex Tolley | June 23, 2008 4:16 PM
as gizmos with really low energy standby modes are mandated by law
That's probably the only way it'll happen. It costs money to design hardware to be low power. No company will do it voluntarily if their competition might not do it and sell products cheaper. Regulating it changes the game theory.
And I think we can design our consumer electronics to be a lot more efficient than they are now.
As for standard wall-warts, USB seems to be winning that one. The phones and devices that don't use USB seem to be using a custom connector because they can make money selling a wall-wart charger, car charger, travel charger, etc. But since they don't have to put the price of all those accessories in the total price, they look like their product is as cheap as the others, until you realize you need to buy all those chargers because none of your old ones work.
Posted by: GregLondon | June 23, 2008 4:28 PM
Did not read all of the posts. I came from an energy summit in which the conservation efforts made some sense to me. I told my hubby and he pointed me at your article.
Ha ha, so I got both sides of the discussion.
As a techie, I can't turn off everything all the time.
My family can dial down the freezer and frig, we can get modern updated power strips and better efficiency appliances if the old are resource hogs, and consolidate what we know should be "off" when we don't need it to be on timers. That was a cool nifty trick I learned at the energy summit.
I mean, if I make my computer sleep between the "examine my inner eyeballs" hours, why should I let it draw power it doesn't need when I am not using it?
The situation isn't completely simple and there is no radical bullet.
All in all it will be a small pittance (compared to winterizing the attic and finding in thermal scans the leaks so we don't get icicles), yet it pointed out to me in all the so very small ways that maybe ...
I don't need to have certain things on all the time and that they can come on when needed (like night lights that sense when light is absent, or hall lights with a timer, etc)
Posted by: Heidi | June 23, 2008 5:15 PM
accelerationista@43, if what you're talking about is colour temperature it's got nothing to do with lumps of steel. It's the colour radiated by a black body at that temperature.
Posted by: Nix | June 23, 2008 5:50 PM
The thing that bothers me about the more irrational of the awareness drives is how backward-thinking they are. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that the future needs more power, not less. Sure, individual devices are becoming increasing efficient, but there'll be a LOT MORE of them. Hell, there's a developing world coming online -- a billion people here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking a lot of power. Nickel-and-diming our power needs just gets a lot of people focused on not-the-problem, leaving them with a set of priorities incompatible with the realities of the near future. Green Parties and awareness groups should be using their leverage to promote things like solar and nuclear power initiatives, not giving concerned citizens feel-good busy-work.
Like all the other serious problems facing humanity, scale is the demon with which we must grapple, and the solution is going to require Big Thinking with Broad Support. Superstitious wall-wart unpluggery shrinks peoples' notions of what's possible.
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 23, 2008 5:57 PM
Bit of trivia (possibly an urban legend, but it sounds like an odd one). A decade or two ago, the U.S. Government _was_ worried about the extra juice all those wall-warts used. So they commissioned a lower-power AC/DC converter, and released the results for anybody to use, patent free, etc. They figured by doing that they could delay the need for another power plant or two.
Posted by: Michael B | June 23, 2008 6:16 PM
Back in the days of lore when I had a Saturday job at Rumbelows we used to have to spend a lot of time explaining to people that you really really shouldn't unplug your VCR at night or if you were going away, especially in winter. And, if you did, then leave it a few hours before you stick a tape in because you'd frequently get moisture build up on the tape heads that would glue itself to any tape you put in.
MiniUSB: The problem here is the phone companies make a fortune out of the connectors - just ask Samsung, so they tend to develop a range of unique connectors for each phone. The other sneaky trick is to change the pin settings in the AC charger so you get the case that while both RIM and Motorola use mini-USB the wall chargers don't fit each other's kit.
Posted by: Daveon | June 23, 2008 6:41 PM
One interesting solution to the power problem involves carpeting the lunar surface with solar arrays, converting the energy to low-intensity microwaves which get beamed down to receiver stations on Earth where they're converted back into usable energy. While that seems far fetched, I don't think (CMIIW) it's due to any hard feasibility limits -- rather, we just don't expect that level of intergovernmental cooperation, forward-thought or general good will on the part of humanity. As far as alternative boondoggles, that would have been a nice purchase...
We could leap-frog centuries of needless hardship and toil if we just got everyone on the same page. Luckily, that seems to be one of the internet's strong suits. Of course, I tend to be a starry-eyed optimist.
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 23, 2008 7:11 PM
The 90% figure probably comes from TV sets; particularly "old" CRT 32" tubes, etc. For fast response their 'standby' modes frequently kept the tubes energised, consuming almost as much power as when on. Not so bad today with LCDs, etc.
PDAs, etc. are designed with battery life in mind, and consume a pittance. Ditto most wall warts (frequently around the 1W mark).
The stuff that can consume power on standby, etc are things like set-top boxes: I've added up all the power from the TV, DVD, etc around the TV, and it came to over 30W on standby. Cheapo chinese firmware, and updating the
EPGs comes to mind.
The solution was easy and safe: ONE powerstrip for TV and STBs with big red switch. Turn off at night. But then I live in a low-energy house to start with: getting the power consumption down below what PVs can produce in Ireland is feasible, and a target :-)
Posted by: Alastair McKinstry | June 23, 2008 7:31 PM
There's sometimes a value in symbolic gestures, so I wouldn't write this off completely. I'd rather, of course, direct people's energy into the most effective solutions available, but in fact the people in the position to engineer and deploy those solutions cannot get funded for political reasons. So we do what we can, and hope we get some real leadership and funding eventually. That's not so bad.
Last time I looked, LEDs did not have the efficacy or color quality to be adequate interior lighting. This may no longer be true; now they may just be unreasonably expensive. In a world where one of the simplest energy efficiency measures, the fluorescent light dimmer--a simple current regulator--is expensive, patented technology, don't look for inexpensive high-quality LEDs for interior lighting applications anytime soon.
Bruce--enter "mid-century modern ceiling fan" into Google for some choices. Casablanca Fan Company makes a model called "Astro" that's so 1950s it's funny, and a steampunk-looking one called "Scandia".
The efficacy of a CFL is roughly four times that of an incandescent of comparable wattage; buy on that rule and you'll get enough light. "Color temperature" is a psychophysical approximation used by photographers, lighting designers, and so forth; neither daylight nor fluorescent light have a black body radiation spectrum. Generally, 5500K CFLs have acceptable color quality, especially when used in conjunction with daylight. The light is much "cooler" than what one gets from typical incandescent lamps, however--closer to daylight at 10am, rather than the sunset glow of type A incandescents.
Posted by: Randolph Fritz | June 23, 2008 7:34 PM
The recent implementation of the fourth basic circuitry element, the memristor, may significantly change the power-consumption landscape as well (amongst other things).
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 23, 2008 7:45 PM
Colour temperature:
While our eyes adapt pretty well to the variations, neither fluorescents nor LEDs have a "clean" spectrum, and that makes anything involving colour-matching a bitch.
Different films had slightly different responses to colour. You could do a lot to tweak the colour in a darkroom, but one of the big things about the digital world is that you can add the particular looks to your images.
Kodachrome was reckoned good for human skin (and the de-facto standard for soft porn.)
Agfachrome was good for landscapes--the greens.
Ektachrome tended to a blue cast, and you would use an 81A filter instead of the usual UV-blocking filter.
And they all went horribly green under fluorescent lights.
Posted by: Dave Bell | June 23, 2008 9:29 PM
You may think I'm being unfair. Why not put all the wall warts in a house on one power block with a single switch, making it easy to turn them on and off?
I put most of my charger warts on a single power strip, which in turn is on a timer for 2 hours per day. Perhaps it's not optimal for some of the battery technologies involved, but it involves less human time.
Posted by: Bill Arnold | June 23, 2008 9:31 PM
Re: Colour Temperature
There are now many full spectrum fluorescents. They've used them on feature films for years, and many newsrooms, as they produce less heat and make for a more comfortable set. Many companies are now developing full specture LED's.
Posted by: Coltrane | June 23, 2008 9:36 PM
As far as magical thinking in general, I honestly think the internet will save our hides. Reddit/Slashdot/BoingBoing/Digg etc. (and blogs like this) own all the mindshare of the wired generations. When we inherit the seats of power, and many policy debates take place in open online forums (does anyone honestly think it won't happen?), ridiculous, irrational policies stand less of a chance. Same goes for organized religions. They just don't stand up to scrutiny, especially when hard facts are just a click away. Put another way, "Given enough eyeballs, all bad ideas are transparent." It's traditional meritocracy mechanics applied to memes and Everything Else. And of course, there are already plenty of Open Government initiatives.
I sound evangelical, and I'm giving humans way too much smart cred, but it does seem to be the path of least resistance. And I also know this is very much Not a New Idea. It's just that we may have written off "Ender's"-style forums a little too early. Here's to hoping, at least.
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 23, 2008 11:04 PM
John4 @35, my city has us recycle CFLs -- they go to a company that takes them apart and recycles the materials.
G. Tingey @38, here, I can get CFLs in bright, soft white, or full spectrum. The dimness depends on the wattage; I have one that is the equivalent of 250W. Don't you live in the UK? You must have different CFLs than we do.
Dave @60, here in the US, I can buy bulbs with specific kelvin, so they do match.
Charlie, I had a post held for review yesterday (probably too many URLs) and it still isn't up.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | June 23, 2008 11:10 PM
carpeting the lunar surface with solar arrays, converting the energy to low-intensity microwaves which get beamed down to receiver stations on Earth
Uh, you'd want it geosynchrnous so you can beam it down to the same spot on the surface. Also, there might be a slight problem with the entire idea not being "fail safe" in any sense of the phrase.
the memristor, may significantly change the power-consumption landscape
I have no idea why.
Posted by: GregLondon | June 23, 2008 11:36 PM
I converted all my christmas lights to LED's last year. hey consumed something crazy like only 5 watts a strand, which was way less than the filimant bulbs. Only problem was they were dim, dim, dim, had a weird flicker to them, and the color just seemed... odd.
Hopefully by the time my mini-flourescent bulbs in the house burn out, they'll have better LED lights figured out.
The biggest consumers of electricity in the home, though, is the refrigerator, isn't it?
Posted by: GregLondon | June 23, 2008 11:46 PM
Greg@65: Heh, good points. Maybe you could do geosynchronous repeaters? The fail-safe could be good old fashioned fossil fuels planet-side. Also, you have the added advantage of no atmosphere gunking up the works. The idea's out there, at any rate.
The idea behind reduced power consumption with memristors is that memory is non-volatile, yet has DRAM access speeds, so devices boot instantaneously -- Standby is replaced with "off".
Posted by: insect_hooves | June 24, 2008 12:00 AM
Taking as a rough guestimate five watts of standby power consumption for each device, multiplied by twenty, we get roughly 100 watts per household. That's not insignificant; it's equivalent to 2.4 kilowatt-hours per day, or about £0.25 in electricity. The same as leaving a single incandescent light bulb glowing 24 hours a day.
Hmm - I'm looking at a newspaper story with an energy audit. It cites a family with two televisions, DVD recorder, decoder box, stereo, fax, Wii console, two computers, home entertainment system, scanner, two printers, electronic keyboard, digital alam clocks and (God help us) lava lamps.
All appliances on standby = 275 watts continually, with a potential savings of $450 per year, and an estimate that it would be "fairly easy" to get half that.
Posted by: Tony Quirke | June 24, 2008 12:19 AM
For all that people bitch about China, their per capita energy consumption is still quite low, and saving both energy and water are things that the average person is very aware of (major public campaigns for both). Shanghai is an exception, but then Shanghai currently has a conspicuous consumption ethic.
Posted by: Robert Prior | June 24, 2008 1:11 AM
I saw a figure today saying the energy consumption of the average chinese citizen is about 1/6th that of a US citizen, and about 1/3 that of a european citizen.
insect_hooves@63 - if you haven't already, you should read what this guy is doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Reed
Posted by: accelerationista | June 24, 2008 2:47 AM
GregLondon @ 66
The biggest consumers of electricity in the home, though, is the refrigerator, isn't it?
Only if, per our host's recommendation, you have gas-fired water heating.
If you have electric water heating, that's the big one.
JHomes
Posted by: JHomes | June 24, 2008 5:59 AM
I like the idea of a big red button (BRB) in each room, for reasons including but not limited to economy.
But at work I try to arrange for a whole computer setup to run off one switch, so that having shut down the computer the rest can be turned off in one move.
Posted by: Adrian Midgley | June 24, 2008 9:28 AM
Charlie @ 6
Deserts aren't actually needed, Newgrange in Ireland is about 500 years older than the Great Pyramid. The roof had remained watertight for 4,000 after the entrance was lost. Tectonic stability is a more important criterion, luckily a large part of the UK lies on the Midland Craton so that's not a big problem for us.
Posted by: Brett Dunbar | June 24, 2008 12:40 PM
Fantastic post! I recently came across the suggestion that everybody used the stairs instead of the lift to save power. It turns out that lifts don't use all that much electricity. And I've seen a sign asking me to measure out how much water I boil by pouring cold water into a mug and then into the kettle. Good grief, life is too short!
Your human cost arguments apply equally to recycling... Why do people recycle *glass* of all things? And they *wash up* the bottles first, too. It's a terrible waste (of human life).
Posted by: Rob Fisher | June 24, 2008 2:30 PM
The biggest consumers of electricity in the home, though, is the refrigerator, isn't it?
Only if, per our host's recommendation, you have gas-fired water heating.
If you have electric water heating, that's the big one.
I think I would add electric cookers and laundry driers.
Posted by: Alex Tolley | June 24, 2008 3:51 PM
I've speculated on why we don't add a heat pump to extract the heat from bath/shower water before it goes down the drain. I would have thought a unit would pay for itself fairly quickly, especially if included in new construction.
Posted by: Alex Tolley | June 24, 2008 3:54 PM
@45Why has no-one thought of this?
I imagine they have, but they probably figured that the process of being drawn down into a subduction zone might involve quite a lot of slow grinding and heat and water, and most of the soluble radioactives could end up just sort of wafting back out.
If you could drill far enough down in...but it's not a very friendly environment as I understand it.
Posted by: Adrian Smith | June 24, 2008 4:38 PM
I wash up my milk bottles for the same reasons that I trim my hedge.
I imagine that the greatest waste of electricity in my house comes from re-boiling the same kettle over and over again. so getting into the habit of only boiling what we need might be worthwhile if I put a higher value on electricity.
For me, this isn't really about money, or time, or even (I'm afraid) drowning fewer Bangladeshis. I just quite like the idea of not wasting things. Any fool can have a good time given unlimited resources: having a good time with just enough has an elegance to it that I find attractive.
The problem with this approach is that it's probably quite close to "I am greener and therefore better than you." On the other hand, the attitude that "I can do this efficiently and you could try to too" is common over a wide range of roles in the Western world.
Posted by: Chris Williams | June 24, 2008 4:42 PM
Another factor to take into account: alternative power arrangements
www.energy-online.net/stories/articles/-/newsletter_stories/june_2/news_/uk_could_halve_gas_imports/
alex@77 - I had a think about this a while back. main drawback is dirty water at a low temperature, so low efficiency in the heat exchanger, which would drop as it became more clogged with dirt etc. possibly some sort of larger or self-cleaning assembly? in domestic situations, the amount of energy you recover would be fairly small (intermittent supply) but better potential in industrial settings. Something similar occurs with absorption cooling, but generally needs a higher temperature of waste heat.
Posted by: accelerationista | June 24, 2008 5:00 PM
accelerationista @80: I use a very simple version of the heat exchanger: in winter, especially in cold weather, if I have a bath, I leave the water in the tub until it's cold before I drain it.
(Reason: in this rather elderly -- 176 year old -- flat, the gas-fired central heating also heats water for a tank. And the bathroom's internal, with no exterior wall. The heat from the bathwater has to go somewhere when it cools into equilibrium with its enironment, and I'd rather it ended up in the structure (walls and floor) of my flat, so I let it stand until it's down to room temperature. Given the specific heat capacity of water and the amount of energy locked up in forty or fifty litres at 40 celsius, leaving it for an hour before pulling the plug seems like a sensible thing to do. Especially when it's sub zero outside ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 24, 2008 5:35 PM
Re: #70, #71
"It's open season on China, newly installed as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide.... But remember that 1 in every 5 of the planet's citizens is Chinese. Looked at in this light, the stats do not look half as bad. On average, the CO2 emissions of a Chinese person are half those of a European and a quarter those of an American or an Australian. Per capita, China's ecological footprint is below the world average...."
["The blame-China syndrome", editorial, New Scientist, 21 June 2008, p.5]
Around 2 a.m. California time, my teenaged son was playing with a cigarette lighter. "Hey," I said, "Global warming!"
He laughed. Then mentioned some speculations on flame structure. Congrats again to Charles Stross for making us laugh and think simultaneously.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | June 24, 2008 5:38 PM
charlie@81
a cunning plan - I spent some time living in edinburgh, and remember the cold winters/drafty flats well. interestingly... heard recently about thermal storage - using paraffin wax. basically a phase change material, in a tank about the size of a calor gas canister. use the boiler to heat it up (or solar, waste heat, whatever). the phase change material changes phase, stores the energy for later. this is good for solar, but also for boilers - reduces rapid cycling of the boiler, effectively acts as a hot water tank without the water.
Posted by: accelerationista | June 24, 2008 5:59 PM
G Tingey #45- grand slam bombs for radioactive waste has been thought of before. The question is, how much do we want to leave stuff lying around the planet? Noticeably increasing our imprint upon the future is something that lots of people havn't really thought about.
Also, those of you who slag off CFL bulbs must be really old and crotchety- last CFL bulbs I noticed anything like their issues with was 8 or 9 years ago at least. All the ones I have used since then have been fine, except for a few seconds of warm up time.
And the LED ones are coming, the place I work supplies on company, Cree, with insulation. However what has taken so long is the invention of acceptably hued white light- LED's were usually very blue white and too bright due to the narrow bandgaps available. The other issue was something to do with the energy they could put out- I roget the technical words, but basically you couldn't put enough power into the LED's to make them bright enough for use as actual lights.
Brett #74 is quite right about Newgrange. See also Maes Howe in Orkney. All you need is some careful sculpting and placing of lumps of rock for the roof and you have a perfectly water tight structure.
Anyway, the number one easy peasy way the UK government could do some good right now would be to pass into law modern, tight, energy efficiency laws for new build houses, and indeed offices.
Offices are improving, in terms of energy use, because the companies have worked out just how much they can save by designing them properly and using all that waste heat from servers and computers and a glass fronted atrium to heat the building- it just has to be shifted around.
Of course smelly hippies knew all this 30 and 40 years ago, but who listens to them...
Posted by: guthrie | June 24, 2008 6:04 PM
Given the problems I have discussing climate change and other issues with even fairly well educated and intelligent people, I've realised that breaking things down into "Things you can do to help" is probably the only way to go for many people. And even then they'll bitch about it all.
Given the complexities of the problems facing us, from the shorter term high energy and food prices, overpopulation, and longer term climate change, ocean acidification etc, a startlingly high number of people of my acqaintance will just shrug and carry gaily on with their lives, pausing only to moan that something needs to be done, but they're busy with work or family or something.
Posted by: guthrie | June 24, 2008 6:14 PM
insect@68: reduced power consumption with memristors is
from that link: When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming "boot-up" process is necessary to retrieve data
That doesn't make any sense. I boot up in a couple of minutes. I might use my computer all day. Get rid of "boot" time, and you get rid of a fraction of the power consumed from usign a computer.
Getting rid of DDR and replacing it with memristors might reduce the amount of current that your gigabyte or more of memory will consume, but the processor chip can draw several amps, and that doesn't ahve DDR in it.
memristors might make some cool things happen as far as computer/electronic devices are concerned, and someone with some investment capital would be wise to investigate further, but I don't think it is much related to reducing power consumption.
Posted by: GregLondon | June 24, 2008 6:15 PM
china's got a lot of CO2, but it's got a lot of people too.
CO2 Per Capita.
Posted by: GregLondon | June 24, 2008 6:21 PM
China now being the world's largest emitter of CO2 is a big deal, regardless of how many Chinese there are. It's the absolute amount of CO2 China creates that matters, so one Chinese person or 20 billion is irrelevant. The atmosphere doesn't distinguish the number of emitters, just the amount emitted.