For technical discussions about electricity, electrical equipment with particular emphasis on safe and compliant installations.
Off topic remarks are liable to be moved elsewhere, or in extreme cases to be deleted.
woodburner wrote:
The internet my give some utility benefits, but the majority of the power involved in running it is for spurious entertainment and vanity consumption.
'Utility' in this context doesn't just mean what's good and useful. If internet spurious entertainment means somebody stays at home instead of driving to their spurious entertainment then that, from the greenhouse gas emission perspective, is 'utility'.
(I'm not averse to a bit of spurious entertainment.)
The internet's added massive energy&environmental costs to an already overburdened system. Think most people use the internet in addition to stuff they've already been doing. There's no use pretending otherwise.
In absolute terms the electricity consumption associated with the internet may sound big but in relative terms it's pretty small - about 2% of energy use:
The big wins are going to come from the really criminal wastes of electricity like inefficient lighting, refrigeration, vehicles etc but pressure should certainly be brought to bear on the IT industry to reduce consumption and shift to renewables as far as possible.
2% is still huge
It presents a skewed picture (as the NS comments say): early internet, averages high-tech economies with ldc's
Internet is growing crazy, with netflix-type stuff and cloud driving that growth. Increase bandwidth, lower utility.
I was going to add more, but my battery's about to go.
The big wins are going to come from the really criminal wastes of electricity like inefficient lighting, refrigeration, vehicles etc but pressure should certainly be brought to bear on the IT industry to reduce consumption and shift to renewables as far as possible.
You forgot electric heating in all its forms, including air conditioning and heat pumps. These are the biggest waste of all and represent a failure of basic building fabric design.
Finally got round to listening to this lecture. Very interesting stuff.
I'm glad he acknowledged that demand side management is significant but he barely touched on it (other than to rightly point out that there is no compelling strategy) and it wasn't listed as one of the options in his last slide.
But it's absolutely key - it can be deployed far quicker, more cheaply and with much lower emissions than constructing new plant.
It's criminal that the powers that be haven't been hammering product standards much harder over the last decade or so to drive down electricity consumption. Sadly the product manufacturers manage to get standards watered down way too far.
But product standards won't help us in the 2015-2020 timeframe - it's going to have to come from behavioural measures. All this political chatter about reducing energy tariffs is just so short sighted and wrongheaded. Reducing demand is the key way to deal with these issues.
