Sign up now and get the best business technology insights direct to your inbox.Carl Weinschenk spoke with Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar, Google, and Co-chairman and vice president of the board, Climate Savers Computing.
Weinschenk: What is Climate Savers Computing?
Weihl: Fundamentally, our mandate is to reduce energy consumption of computers. The major focus is on personal computers. The goal is to reduce the energy consumption by a factor of two in the next four years. That’s really the way it worked out based on aggressive but achievable goals. The group was formed in June of this year.
Weinschenk: How do you do this?
Weihl: There are two pieces. One is improved hardware efficiency, the other is improved efficiency in the way computers are used. [The goal] in the second is a much higher adoption and use of power management features and, over time, improving them. Today a laptop goes into sleep mode or various low-power modes to save energy. That is vital to battery life. Most people are not aware that desktops have the same capabilities. Most computers are idle 60, 70 or 80 percent of the time. A machine at work may be used five or six hours a day, and typically five days a week, not seven. When we net it all out, three-quarters of the time they are sitting there idly. Typically, many organizations leave machines on [when they are away]. They draw a little less power than when they are actively doing something, but they are still drawing 50 or 60 watts. So it's like a big incandescent light bulb is constantly on.
Weinschenk: What about the hardware efficiency?
Weihl: The second piece is hardware efficiency. We are targeting in the near term very actionable low-hanging fruit. In typical computers today, servers and desktop AC power from the wall is converted to DC to be used by computing components. This is relatively inefficient, on the order of 65 percent efficiency. Thirty-five percent of the power coming out of the wall is thrown away by the power supply before it gets anywhere near the CPU or the memory [or other elements of the machine]. Even worse are the other power converters in computers. In the old days, [the AC was converted to] 12 volt and 5 volt DC and was directly used by the CPU and other components. Today the power supply is still 12 volts and 5 volts, but the memory typically uses voltages of 1.1 volts, 1 .2 volts or 1.5 volts. With each generation of semiconductors, that drops. The power supply conversions to 1.5 [and the other lower voltages] also are typically inefficient, in the neighborhood of 65 or 70 percent.
Weinschenk: Was the move to lower voltages promoted by green concerns?
Weihl: It's been motivated by the need to save energy in the chip. If you don’t do that, energy consumption balloons as the number of transistors on the chip increases. So it's been because of a very fundamental need to keep power consumption down. If they didn’t do it, the chips would be too hot. If the voltage level today was where it was 20 years ago, with many millions of transistors on the chip, it would just burn itself up. They are saving power, but it was not motivated by environmental concerns. They are motivated by the limits of the technology.
Weinschenk: So it's increasingly wasteful.
Weihl: If you've got a machine using 200 watts, 100 is just going up as heat from power supply and converters and not doing any useful work. And you have to get rid of that heat, which takes additional energy in the form of air conditioning. The technology exists today to make those power converters much more efficient. High-end servers typically have power supplies with 90 percent efficiency or better. They can build DC-to-DC converters that are 90 percent or more efficient. It's possible. The technology is here today. It is used in very high-end servers that need to produce as little heat as possible. Because they are packed so densely, they must have much more efficient power supplies.
Weinschenk: What is the goal?
Weihl: We've set efficiency targets over the next four years to raise efficiency of AC-to-DC power supplies in PCs to slightly over 90 percent. We will announce near the end of the year or in January efficiency targets for the next three years — which will take effect next summer — of DC-to-DC conversions that are approximately 90 percent efficient. The targets are not finalized. It depends on what we decide is technically feasible.
Weinschenk: Does this involve great cost?
Weihl: It’s a matter of getting people to want to do it and getting sales volumes high enough to get prices down. Today, efficiencies can be 90, 92 or 94 percent. But it does cost more. Today a power supply with 80 percent efficiency costs $20 more. The EPA this year set the first real efficiency standards for PCs. The cost premium for an Energy Star PC is about $20. Half to two-thirds of that is probably the power supply. [The changes] will pay for themselves over the machines in reduced operating cost. But most people look only at acquisition costs. At high volumes, the cost premium with 80 percent or 90 percent power supplies are zero or very close to zero. The goal is to get manufacturers and purchasers to move together.
Weinschenk: Are you gaining a lot of support?
Weihl: Yes, we particularly have support in the IT industry. Most of the major PC manufacturers are on board, and the rest I expect to come in. Now we have HP, Dell, Lenovo, Hitachi, NEC, Intel, AMD, Sun, Google, the World Wildlife Fund, Fujitsu and others. When we launched in June, 40 major companies were part of the launch. Non-profit organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, the National Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute all signed on. Companies in the organization commit to purchasing high-efficiency systems. They are committing to making and selling such devices. That doesn't mean every product they sell meets the requirements. They commit to buying them [for internal use]. A key message to get across is that the technology is there, the cost is very low, and it will pay for itself over the life of the machine.
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