The 2,000 Watt Society

jscalow

I have just read a great article in the Sunday Times magazine regarding the 2,000 Watt Society. The basis being that to combat climate change we mustn't consume more than 2,000 Watt's per day In theory, it shouldn’t be difficult, because 2,000W is what the average human uses already. But that’s an average. In practice, consumption varies enormously. The typical Bangladeshi uses just 300W. Across Europe the figure is about 5,400W. And in the US it’s a stonking 11,400W.
Recent calculations suggest that IT will very soon overtake aviation as a guzzler of energy. All these videos on YouTube and unread blogs take up space on servers that suck ever-increasing amounts from the grid. An avatar on the online game Second Life uses as much energy as the average Brazilian.
It might help if people knew how much they could save. This year the average domestic fuel bill reached £1,000 for the first time. By reducing consumption to 2,000W per person, households could save more than £600 a year.

If you would like to read the full article-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5188314.ece

I found it fascinating, just to realise that posting this will consume more energy, not my pc use or yours, but the added memory needed to store this on mse server somewhere.

Pink.

Hi jscalow,

As your thread has dropped down the Old Style board I've moved it across to the Green and Ethical board to see if you can get some replies.

Pink

Ben84

I suspect this is a great simplification of the situation. I'm not sure you can turn environmental impact directly in to watts and portion it out like that. Suppose for example we have a perfect 2,000w society that is hooked up to a typical 40% efficient power plant that then gets improved and upgraded to become 80% efficient. In this example it's not consuming more fuel or resources of any kind, it's just delivering double the energy. People living there could consume more energy without more environmental impact, but then they wouldn't be a 2,000w society any more either.

We do already see this type of thing in the great discrepancy between efficiency and fuels used around the world. France for example uses mostly low carbon nuclear power to generate electric, while America have lots of coal power plants. It's pretty clear from the figures that residents of France can consume a lot more electrical energy per unit of environmental impact.

Rather than working to watts we need to define a unit of environmental impact and then relate it to real things, but that is extremely difficult as environmental impact takes a huge range of forms.

geordie_joe

jscalow wrote: »

I found it fascinating, just to realise that posting this will consume more energy, not my pc use or yours, but the added memory needed to store this on mse server somewhere.

I seriously doubt Martin adds more memory to the server every time some makes a post.

economiser

jscalow wrote: »

I have just read a great article in the Sunday Times magazine regarding the 2,000 Watt Society. The basis being that to combat climate change we mustn't consume more than 2,000 Watt's per day In theory, it shouldn’t be difficult, because 2,000W is what the average human uses already. But that’s an average. In practice, consumption varies enormously. The typical Bangladeshi uses just 300W. Across Europe the figure is about 5,400W. And in the US it’s a stonking 11,400W.
Recent calculations suggest that IT will very soon overtake aviation as a guzzler of energy. All these videos on YouTube and unread blogs take up space on servers that suck ever-increasing amounts from the grid. An avatar on the online game Second Life uses as much energy as the average Brazilian.
It might help if people knew how much they could save. This year the average domestic fuel bill reached £1,000 for the first time. By reducing consumption to 2,000W per person, households could save more than £600 a year.

If you would like to read the full article-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5188314.ece

I found it fascinating, just to realise that posting this will consume more energy, not my pc use or yours, but the added memory needed to store this on mse server somewhere.

You can't consume watts/day. A watt is a rate of flow (joules/second) not a quantity. As an alternative to the joule the concept of the kWh is often used. This is in effect kilojoules/second multiplied by hours (kJ h/s), an althogether daft unit but it has become almost universal. Did you mean using power at the rate of 2000 watts for a day? This would be 2kW x 24 h or 45kWh per day.

jscalow

I think this was the jist of the article. Totally agree about french nuclear powerstations and energy effiecency-


Watts are like the rate at which water flows out of a tap. The total energy used is measured by timing the flow (how long the tap has been running at that rate). This gives the total amount of water in the bath, or rather the watt-hours for which your utility company bills you. Thus, over 24 hours, consumption at a rate of 2,000W totals 48,000 watt-hours (48 kilowatt-hours or kWh). In a year, as I’ve tried to explain rather desperately to my wife, that comes to 17,520kWh