Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Scope and reduction Part I

The environment is affected by the many things that we do. Even small things that we do - we do en masse - millions of people.

Millions of people buy computers.

Millions of people leave them on all the time.

Just a slight modification to our behavior patters and a slight increase of cost of computers and resources that are used and gone forever could be resources - well never used or vastly reduced in usage.

Consider, that the average computer really uses about as much power as 1 to 3 lightbulbs. Not including the monitor.

There are solar cells that produce enough power computers a significant portion of the time. And they could potential have surplus power during the day to charge batteries to run the computer on in to the night.

One person a lone doing this is not enough to affect our energy usage.

A small group of people or even a large group of people implementing this kind of existing technology is not enough to change our environment footprint and our energy usage.

But an executive mandate - that all new computers be sold with an adequate solar cell and that cell must be used to power the computer (not the monitor) - would really reduce the power usage of our society.

In fact, such a reduction could reduce power demands to the extent of affecting prices by reducing demand for fuel to create electricity.

Something to think about anyway. It is fairly unlikely that anyone would take any action on such an idea. Certainly not to the level of actually changing our society to make things better for everyone.

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