Earth Hour went global this week with cities around the world (including Chicago) turning off their lights for one hour in order to “clearly demonstrate in participating cities, the connection between energy usage and climate change”. Sadly one enterprising blogger (via the Freakonomics blog) has found that the reported drop in energy usage during the earth hour was preceeded by a large power spike as people prepared for the event. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Whether the same spike occurred in Chicago (unlikely seeing as the participation was pretty sparse) I don’t know. From a carbon emissions perspective it is largely irrelevant since the majority of our electricity generation is nuclear.
halfdunn : flickr
Here’s another example I stumbled across this week (via LifeHacker). LocalCooling is an application which essentially provides a fancy front end and some presets to the existing Windows power management settings, with the aim of reducing your PC’s energy consumption. If we’re going to get pedantic about it, this application actually causes a marginal increase in power consumption because the extra processor ticks it eats up while it sits in your system tray could be avoided by simply firing up Control Panel and modifying the settings yourself.
However that’s not the killer flaw of this application. LocalCooling tracks your (inaccurately calculated) energy savings and posts your individual or company score to their website, allowing users to compete for greeniness. Sounds great – except that the scoring system is devised in such a way that users with large, inefficient computers (or companies with large numbers of computers sitting idle) can score points more quickly than users with efficient PCs – thus incentivising users to run inefficient setups.
The problem with both of these efforts (and indeed any scheme devised to “raise awareness” of an issue) is that by being poorly conceived they end up damaging their causes’ credibility with the very people whose awareness they seek to raise.
This put me in a negative frame of mind and so to make myself feel better I’ve decided to look into doing some recycling (although Chicago’s blue bag scheme is widelyregarded to be a shambles) and using some unused juice from my always-on PC to run Folding@Home. Maybe some good will come of this after all.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Comment.
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Earth Hour – EPIC FAIL
Earth Hour went global this week with cities around the world (including Chicago) turning off their lights for one hour in order to “clearly demonstrate in participating cities, the connection between energy usage and climate change”. Sadly one enterprising blogger (via the Freakonomics blog) has found that the reported drop in energy usage during the earth hour was preceeded by a large power spike as people prepared for the event. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Whether the same spike occurred in Chicago (unlikely seeing as the participation was pretty sparse) I don’t know. From a carbon emissions perspective it is largely irrelevant since the majority of our electricity generation is nuclear.
Here’s another example I stumbled across this week (via LifeHacker). LocalCooling is an application which essentially provides a fancy front end and some presets to the existing Windows power management settings, with the aim of reducing your PC’s energy consumption. If we’re going to get pedantic about it, this application actually causes a marginal increase in power consumption because the extra processor ticks it eats up while it sits in your system tray could be avoided by simply firing up Control Panel and modifying the settings yourself.
However that’s not the killer flaw of this application. LocalCooling tracks your (inaccurately calculated) energy savings and posts your individual or company score to their website, allowing users to compete for greeniness. Sounds great – except that the scoring system is devised in such a way that users with large, inefficient computers (or companies with large numbers of computers sitting idle) can score points more quickly than users with efficient PCs – thus incentivising users to run inefficient setups.
The problem with both of these efforts (and indeed any scheme devised to “raise awareness” of an issue) is that by being poorly conceived they end up damaging their causes’ credibility with the very people whose awareness they seek to raise.
This put me in a negative frame of mind and so to make myself feel better I’ve decided to look into doing some recycling (although Chicago’s blue bag scheme is widely regarded to be a shambles) and using some unused juice from my always-on PC to run Folding@Home. Maybe some good will come of this after all.
Tags: Carbon Emissions, Cities Around The World, Climate Change, Company Score, Electricity Generation, Energy Consumption, Energy Savings, Energy Usage, Freakonomics Blog, Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, Management Settings, Marginal Increase, Power Consumption, Power Management, Power Spike, Road To Hell, Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, Scoring System, System Tray, Windows Power
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.