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Half the electricity in a PC is wasted: Intel, Google

By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com on June 13th, 2007

An awful lot of juice meant to power PCs never gets used so tech companies -- including Google and Intel -- have teamed up to try and make PCs and servers run more efficiently.

Google, Intel and a host of PC and component companies on Tuesday unfurled the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, an effort to increase energy efficiency in PCs.

At the heart of the initiative is a push to get PC makers and consumers to adopt more efficient power supplies and voltage regulators. These two components, working together, convert AC power from a wall socket to 12-volt DC power that a computer uses.

Roughly 50 percent of the power delivered from a wall socket to a PC never actually performs any work, according to Urs Hölzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations. Half the energy gets converted to heat or is dissipated in some other manner in the AC-to-DC conversion. Around 30 percent of the power delivered to the average server gets lost, he added. The power in both cases is lost before any work is accomplished by a computer: later, even more energy is lost by PCs sitting idle, or as heat dissipated by other components.

By adopting more energy-efficient components, PCs and servers can utilize 90 percent or more of the electricity delivered to them. Google's own servers, in fact, are already 90 to 93 percent efficient.

"This is not a technology problem. We have power supplies with 90 percent efficiency shipping today," Hölzle said.

The problem is cost, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel. Making a PC more power efficient in this manner adds about US$20 to its retail cost, and it adds about US$30 to the cost of a server.

Part of the initiative is to figure out ways to eliminate this price difference, Gelsinger added. Some utilities, such as California's Pacific Gas and Electric are toying with giving consumers rebates for buying energy-efficient PCs. Volume production will eventually eliminate any additional costs, he said. Chances are, energy-efficient PCs and servers will take off in Japan, Europe and North America first, and later in more cost-conscious markets like China.

The organisation will also work to lower power consumption by curbing PC idle time and improving other components. Right now, an un-optimised PC consumes about US$30 a year in electricity to operate, said Gelsinger. An optimised PC can drop that figure to US$10, he said.

Under Climate Savers' wish list, generic PCs and servers will be at least 90 percent efficient by 2010. If that goal can be met, these power-efficient servers and PCs will save 71.6 billion kilowatts of electricity in that year, said Gelsinger. The amount of electricity saved would result in 54 million tons of carbon dioxide not being put into the air that year.

PC makers are also trying to come up with ways to show how energy-efficient PCs can help a company's bottom line by lowering power consumption. Dell, for instance, sells an energy-efficient server. It costs US$100 more than a typical, similar server, but the energy savings pay for the additional costs in a year, said Jon Weisblatt, senior manager of energy efficiency at Dell.

Weisblatt also added that Dell ships PCs with Windows Vista with the energy-efficient settings turned on. In general, most PC vendors ship their boxes with the efficiency setting turned off.

Talkback

the laws of physics

Well, DUH. Power = i-squared x resistance. So the power dissipated in a pc, is equal to the resistance of the circuitry times the current SQUARED. It can add up fast. This is one of the laws of physics and is related to ohms law. THe only way to get better power consumption is to reduce resistance in power supplies, chips and circuits. I'm sure the power wasted by a PC is nothing compared to other consumer electronics and applicances.

AnonymousAnonymous June 13th, 2007
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you are almost right

Unfortunately computers are not resistive loads, they are reactive. That's part of the reason that efficient PSUs use power factor correction to make them appear to be resistive to the grid. In order to measure the power used by a computer, or any other reactive load, you use P=IV, where V is the RMS value of AC voltage.

AnonymousAnonymous June 14th, 2007
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Power Factor Correction

They've been doing this for years in europe now. Big companies get charged through the nose for power that they waste, not that they use. They spend money on more efficient supplies and they get savings in energy expenditure.

And anon is quite right, a power supply is a reactive load, with a hell of a lot more going on than a simple resistive load.

AnonymousAnonymous June 19th, 2007
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