Computing and the future of the planet
You may have noticed that my blog has been a little quiet recently. Well I've been away on holiday for a couple of weeks and have had a good break away from computers. But I was still thinking about them whilst I was away, and in particular, the effects of computing devices on the environment.
It's certainly true that computers will continue to become more prevalent, particularly as they are being embedded in more and more devices. Two things we know about computers are that they consume electrical power and generate heat, which usually results in the consumption of more power in some form just to keep them cool. The generation of electricity often has a drastic impact on the environment through the (hopelessly inefficient) burning of fossil fuels and the additional greenhouse gasses this generates through to the production and disposal of batteries created from toxic substances. One solution is to generate as much power as possible from renewable sources, and I now buy my electricity from a supplier which uses only renewable (wind and hydro) forms of generation. But is this enough to limit the effects of computing on the environment (NO!) or do we need to do more, especially as we are using more and more computing devices? (YES!)
It struck me that one of the things developers of mobile applications will usually try to do is write their apps in such a way that it minimizes power consumption, thus preserving battery life in the mobile device. It's perfectly possible to do something similar for software written for desktop and server platforms, but does anyone ever stop to think about the effects their software has on power consumption? I suspect not. Windows Vista offers a perfect example; it's fancy new graphics features are predicated on all users having a high end graphics card with powerful GPU - which uses loads of extra power and requires additional cooling (have you seen the size of those heatsinks?!) to dissipate enormous amounts of wasted heat. I bet when it releases plenty of users will go out and buy it, then upgrade their graphics cards (thus creating more pollution from the obsolete cards) to newer models which consume more power and generate more heat. If Windows Vista was designed not to use fancy graphics capabilities, power consumption may be lower, less energy would be wasted as heat and there might be fewer 'osbolete' graphics cards to dispose of. Don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting this is a Microsoft specific problem, it isn't. It's the responsiblity of every computer user and member of the computing-related industries. Waste recycling legislation and initiatives such as Energy Star have had some effect in reducing the environmental impact of computer hardware but it would seem from the (brief) bit of research that I've done that there has been very little consideration given to the effects of software use and production on the environment. I think this is something I may think more about of the coming few months.
The other thing that struck me is how much heat (i.e. energy!) is wasted by computers. Surely we can find some inventive heat recovery mechanism that would allow us to recover that waste heat and put it to a much better use? Just think how much heat must be extracted from a large data centre over the course of an average day - enough to do some water heating or perhaps low-level power generation maybe? Do such systems already exist? I don't know, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who can give me more information on any of these issues.
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David
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