Personally, I’m very impressed with the rapid growth of support gained by Earth Hour campaign. Began in 2007 for the first time with only 1 city - Sydney, Earth Hour campaign has got some global supports for the following year - 2008. This year, Earth Hour 2009 has expanded its reach to 85 countries. I believe this “Vote for Earth” campaign has created broader awareness on the attentive need for energy and resource conservation (which in turn tackles global warming issue), to communities that otherwise didn’t realize the fact.
So ya, many have shown support by turning off the lights of some prominent geograhical landmarks, business premises and homes. At the same time, all social networking sites have also witnessed a flood of #earthhour tag, as well as surging search on related keywords.
Many bloggers have also taken opportunity to announce to the blogsphere that they have voted for Earth. Status message like “I Vote for Earth” is also easily spotted in instant messaging contact list from channels such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger.
(Don’t ask why you never seen these status messages from me. ‘Cos I never posted them haha, did this just for the sake of creating an image for this blog entry)
So now, the question is, what’s next?? Wait for another year, switch off lights for an hour on 27th Mar 2010, and go party? Wait for another year, and take the chance to post similar status messages or blog posts again? Wait for another year, and stand-by at strategic location with DSLR and tripod to take before-after pictures of KL skyline at 8.30pm? Wait for another year, take some in-the-dark pictures and show to the world?
Only Love Him/Her on Valentine’s Day?
Undoubtedly, support for awareness of global warming and energy conservation should not just be limited to joining the publicity hype for once-in-a-year action. It’s the same case like the over-commercialized Valentine’s Day. Only show your love once in a year on 14th Feb?
Minimize Wastage without Introducing Inconvenience or Compromising on Safety
Personally, I believe that some thoughtful actions in everyone’s everyday life can make some differences, if the aim is on minimizing energy wastage (impossible to avoid wastage all together, but can be minimized). However, these actions should be done without introducing inconvenience to own self and others. And most importantly, without compromising on safety too.
For example, if you have a house located in a not brightly-lit area, it’s simply unsafe to switch off all wall-fencing lights at night. However, a better way to minimize energy wastage in this case, is by installing energy saving bulbs, so that we can get the same brightness at much lower power consumption.
Image by thingermejig
I have heard comment of a company disallowing staffs to charge mobile phones in office, in order to cut electricity cost. This, to me, is ridiculous and introducing inconvenience. Have the directors and senior managers to switch off airconds in their rooms, when they are physically away, is a much practical move.
Personally, in the name of green, I think these are some actions that everyone of us could easily adhere to:
- Don’t feel proud for leaving your PC running 24 hours when it’s not doing anything or serving any purpose
This is so superbly common among the university and college students, as well as Generation Y working adults. - Put your laptop to sleep before leaving for lunch or extended away. What’s so difficult to simply close the laptop lid?
- Switch off airconds and lights of your workplace area before leaving office, but without affecting others. This usually works for a bigger office premise, when you’re the last one leaving from an area.
- Try to use energy saving bulbs, if financially allowed.
- Support for electrical appliances that come with some environmental-friendly features, especially for power-hungry appliances like fridge, aircond and water-heater.
- Check faucets and pipes for leaks, and fix them as soon as possible.
Large Scale Saving driven by Corporate Initiative
Did Google shut down some servers during Earth Hour to show that they are voting for Earth? As far as I know, no, Google didn’t. But does it means that Google is not supporting energy conversation initiative? No, this is not true.
In fact, I’m amazed with the extend of go-green initiative that Google is pursuing in long-term.
Spend half an hour to read the efforts that Google has taken, is taking, and will be taken in the name of Efficient Computing, and I’m sure you will be impressed as well. Google with tens of thousands of servers deployed, is definitely making a big collective difference by minimizing energy consumption at its data centers. While majority of enterprises in the world are not even optimizing electricity usage, Google has gone beyond reducing electricity energy.
But sustainability is about more than electricity, so we’ve gone beyond just reducing our energy consumption. We are pleased to announce two of our facilities run on 100% recycled water, and by 2010 we expect recycled water to provide 80% of our total data center water consumption. We also carefully manage the retirement of our servers to ensure that 100% of this material is either reused or recycled. Finally, we are engaging our users and peers to help build a clean and efficient energy future. This broader impact could be significant; if all data centers operated at the same efficiency as ours, the U.S. alone would save enough electricity to power every household within the city limits of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Source: Google Efficient Computing
Government-driven Move to Push for Green Computing?
I’m interered to know, whether or not the term green computing ever come to MAMPU, when they spend so much time writing stacks of guidelines and instructions for government IT projects. If Malaysian government is pushing for requirements on energy saving computing facilities, this will directly introduce a big difference to all data centers in Malaysia. Just imagine how many servers sold in Malaysia are actually belonging to government ICT projects.
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