Once again, we’re very pleased by the powerful responses we’ve got to our original Black is the New Green blog and to the follow-up.

I’d like to address a couple of the reservations people have had.

One commenter thought that the wattage estimates yielded by the calculator we linked to were too high. He wrote:

Checking off the closest equivalents to what I have, it recommends a power supply capable of producing 160W, and I’m guessing that if it were up to date it would specify that I need a 350W power supply. The actual steady-state power consumption of my system at idle is 80W; that’s not a theoretical or computed value, that’s a value measured directly with a power meter.

It is worth pointing out that we put up the link to the calculator because one of the responses to the original “Black Is the New Green” was that our estimate that an idle computer uses about 100W was too high. So 80W is pretty close. And another commentator sent a great link to a site that tests Vista running different graphics cards and on different settings [http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10945] . The tests found that the machine idled around 105W. So again, 100W looks like a useful estimate for the original calculation, which was meant only to show just how much electricity is being wasted. The point isn’t that this or that machine uses a given amount of energy. The reason we’re throwing around these huge numbers is to show that the scale of this problem, which we almost never think about, is absolutely staggering.

Another site that makes this case brilliantly is Mr. Electricity’s [http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html] explanation of power usage. He shows desktops using 60W-250W. He shows that screensavers save no electricity at all, and that standby reduces consumption to 1W-6W. In other words, the available savings, expressed as a percentage, are huge. And given the scale of the computer population, the total potential savings are huge as well.

The fact is, there are billions of “nega-Watt” hours out there – we could save the equivalent of dozens of power plants’ generating capacity (and therefore dozens of powerplants) just by getting a bit smarter.

One organization that has already figured this out is LocalCooling. Our hats are off to them. To those who say that LocalCooling doesn’t go far enough, we’d say, well, sure, people could go into their settings and make their machines more efficient. But if they actually did, there would be no need for a software solution. Projects like LocalCooling just make it easier. The easier it is, the more people will do it. The more people that do it, the better off we’ll be.

As great as we think LocalCooling is, we think there is room for more such endeavors, and for collaboration. We’re not just doing this to create software. We’re making a point about the way our whole civilization is set up. And we’re interested in maximizing the efficiency of not only the world’s PCs, but also its Sun servers and Linux machines. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. We just want to get it moving.

I read recently that your microwave uses more electricity operating its clock than it does heating your dinner. That’s just not the way it should be. Similarly, if your computer uses more power running a screensaver or keeping the CPU warm than it does doing your actual work, then it’s just not doing what it’s supposed to do.

To go to the Zerofootprint “Black is the New Green” blog, click http://www.zerofootprint.net/green_stories/green_stories_item.asp?type_=53&ID=14973 .

To go to the main Zerofootprint site, click www.zerofootprint.net .

To see Mr. Electricity’s account of computers’ electricity use use, click http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html

To see a measurement of the electricity use of Vista machines running various graphics cards, visit [http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10945] .

To see some of the numbers on global computer use and CO2 emissions, click http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/2281?fpsrc=ealert061127 .

To read about people leaving their machines on over Christmas, click on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6183259.stm .