Example Of Energy Usage Essay

Energy consumption has been an issue of concern for many organizations. There have been calls to control the heat that is released to the environment. It is in the quest to control the climate change. This paper will focus on energy usage for my organization.

Assumptions

An average computer uses 60 to 300 watts. However, it is very difficult to know exactly how much a computer consumes on a day because of the different hardware configurations. It is averaged that they use 100 watts

An LCD uses 20-40 watts for a monitor. It is averaged to be using 30 watts

A laptop computer uses 15-60 watts far less than desktops. It is averaged to be using 40watts
The organization has 6.956 desktop computers, 5,000 (17” LCD) monitors, 2876 (15’ LCD) monitors, 1,521 laptops and 200 servers.

The computer systems are assumed to be used 8 hours a day after which they are shut off

Given by these values, the consumption on a day is computer as follows:
The total consumption per day translates to 913.755 kwh. This translates to 333, 520 kilowatts a year and going by the $0.107/KWH, the total cost is $35,686.7 a year.
Given the total green house emission energy usage, it is possible to calculate carbon dioxide emissions. Using the energy use calculator, the amount of carbon emission produced by this amount of energy is equivalent to 8.2 tons of CO2 annually. However, to estimate the total carbon emissions of the web are not as easy as estimating the green house emission for a car. It is estimated that simple web browsing could produce 20mg of CO2 and whether it is downloading a document or viewing a picture, every single activity taking place in a virtual environment leads to great impact on the environment. For these organizations with numerous numbers of computers, carbon emissions may surpass the approximated amounts. The internet is estimated to produce 20% of all the green house gases in the world though this is clearly unsustainable.
The Climate Group undertook a high level global analysis situation and used a number of general assumptions. Among these assumptions, some are not applicable to organizations like the one we are reviewing. For example, the assumptions that 20% of desktops are workstations. This assumption is not applicable because the proliferation of highly commoditized hardware developed by established PC vendors such as HP. Workstations are generally disappearing in the market and by 2020, this assumption will be null. Other assumptions include workstations consume 2.5 times desktop in all modes, the approximate time for commercial computers is 14 hours/day against consumer usage of 3 hours/day and three types of servers; 200, 500 and 6000W/unit. This organization is an educational facility and in most instances, the average consumption time is 6 hours a day against 14 hours provided in the assumption. For personal computing, the usage time is far much more than three hours. Enabling effects assumptions indicated that seven billion DVDs and 10 million CDs could be sold per year. The assumption also had it that all this could be replaced with network connectivity by 2020. However, changes has occurred more rapidly and the use of DVD and CDs has decreased significantly with organizations adopting online forms of exchanging content growing further even before the 2020 prediction.

Works Cited

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