Cut the flab

One aspect of productive energy is cutting down waste, the other is of finding ways to obtain maximum work from minimum energy.

Waste can be as visible as in waste heat generated in industrial units. Globally, there are attempts to capture this and recycle it into the energy cycle in CHP plants. A more subtle, and often unnoticed part of energy waste is in the use of materials. Especially materials with a life-cycle cost of energy that is huge.

In the west, the focus by greens is on one such waste - the packaging, or rather, over-packaging! Any average Indian who has been to the US for the first time will come back to tell family about the use and throw culture. Plastic and paper containers, tissues, packaging, etc that any Indian would love to preserve is dumped after single use. A visit to a mall will show buyers wrapping every single apple in a separate plastic wrapper!

Using more cardboard, paper, plastic, space, and fossil fuels, more than necessary to get things from one place to another is the done thing. Perhaps, these are hangovers from the days of plenty.

TreeHugger gives seven stark instances--illustrated in a photo gallery--of when packaging has gone awry. Like the picture that shows the shipment of a single ink cartridge which wasted a whole lot of cardboard, space and fossil fuels. A waste of energy from the shipping of initial raw materials, manufacture and shipping out.

And then again, 40 per cent of American households own at least one video game console. The Wii, XBox 360and Playstation3 all consume vastly different amounts of power but, all together, gaming consoles eat up enough energy to power the city of San Diego! New ways of powering these luxuries are now being suggested.

Most times, all it may require is a small tinkering of a small circuit somewhere to cut the waste from our myriad gadgets. Some little rethinking.

For instance, LG Display has introduced a new LCD panel that can be illuminated by sunlight when outdoors instead of the backlight. The LCD panel uses "backlight data signal switching technology," which means the backlight panels can be switched between reflective mode in sunlight to transmissive mode indoors. When the outdoor mode is in use, energy consumption falls by 75%.

HP users can expect to see laptops more environmentally-friendly by upgrading to Boston Power’s next-generation Sonata Lithium-ion batteries. The Sonata battery lasts for 1,000 charging cycles (3 years), compared to the 300 cycle limit of a conventional Li-ion battery. The powerful battery takes only half an hour to charge up to 80 percent capacity, while conventional batteries take two hours.

Another example is the energy efficient supercomputer in Argonne National Laboratory. The Blue Gene/P high-performance computer runs at an awe-inspiring 557 teraflops (557 trillion calculations per second) and uses only 1 MW of power— about a third of that used by a conventionally built supercomputer of comparable size. How it does this is simply by using six air handlers that move 300,000 cubic feet of air per minute under the facility floor. Other supercomputer facilities use large air conditioners that require significantly more energy.

A little tinkering with the system in hand. But prior to that, one needs a big rewiring in the way we look at energy and resources! As long as it is almost free, and seemingly continuous, not many will bother about the tinkering.

Can we have some suggestions for five small changes at work that could cut down on energy use? (NOT power alone.) Just five.