Alternative Power

Whether you agree with the hubbub surrounding global warming and consider it a “hot” topic (pun intended) or not, perhaps you might be interested to know that you can do something about it – from your desk.

 

Maybe you’re the type of person that forgets to turn off their computer at the end of the day. Fact is, those hours that a computer stays on actually cost many hours of kilowatt energy – energy wasted, estimated at 30 billion hours of kilowatt energy per year, in fact. According to Uniblue Systems, the CO2 emissions from all those computers are huge, especially as the emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car.

 

Uniblue Systems wants to do something about this. Announced this week, the software provider has launched LocalCooling.com, a downloadable application that optimizes the power settings on a PC so that when in save mode, power is used more effectively and efficiently.

 

This non-commercial site does not aim to sell, rather its purpose is to help fight global warming by giving the common PC user an easy-to-install application that updates results in real time for power savings, translating all of the information into environmental terms, such as how many trees and barrels of oil have been saved since the LocalCooling.com Community started.

 

According to a press release, members can set up Individual, Team and Company Accounts showing the savings for one, two or a whole office network of PCs. And for added fun, users can compete with each other in the "Top 100" League Tables of the biggest savers worldwide.

 

As members join, the community could prevent over 30 billion kWh of gas emissions each year, amounting to a saving of around $3 billion on energy costs alone.