Electronics, energy conservation and the hypocrisy of ‘sustainability
09 July 2008
Anand Sethi found the latest ‘sustainable’ conference enlightening, but not sustainable
I started writing a piece about how every time an American Presidential election comes round, ‘offshoring’ and overseas manufacturing (with an insinuation of purported loss of US jobs) comes centre stage. Before I could finish the piece, I had to go off to Stockholm to participate (with all the attendant carbon costs) in a ‘Global’ conference with ‘sustainability’ as the main theme. As is usual with these hyped up conferences, there were some big name speakers, high level attendees, the Crown Princess of Sweden as the chief guest and of course to quote Shakespeare, ‘a lot of sound and fury, signifying ******* ’.
But as a ‘B Team’ speaker and a ‘back-bencher’, I had plenty of time to see, listen, and note. First up, I noted that the opulent conference hall was well lit by incandescent GLS lights, with no signs of any CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) lights let alone the energy efficient LED lights. The evening banquet was at the absolutely grand ‘City Hall’, yes the same venue where they have the Nobel Prize ceremonies, and guess what, the lights were again the incandescent variety! Over the past few years, experts around the world have been agitating against the use of incandescent lights (only 11 lumens per watt) and promoting the use of CFL (40 lumens per watt) and LED lights (108 lumens per watt). In my country many electricity utilities and local authorities hand out FREE CFL replacements if you surrender your GLS lamps, but here we were at a ‘global sustainability’ conference in Sweden and they use energy inefficient lights!
Yet, interestingly, one of the keynote speakers at the session on ‘Technologies for life’ was the Managing Director of ‘Grameen Shakti’, a subsidiary of Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank. Now, Grameen Shakti has a profitable business in providing Solar based LED lighting solutions to the poorest sections of rural Bangladesh. I wondered if he had noticed the profusion of GLS lamps!
In the same session was a fascinating presentation by the Managing Director of Electrolux, the leading European Appliances manufacturer. According to him, in Europe alone there were at least two million, old technology based Energy Inefficient appliances still in use and only because nobody has come up with a profitable business model to replace these with more modern energy efficient appliances (a modified ESCO model). A quick calculation based on a reasonable assumption of minimum 250 watts of wasted energy per appliance per week comes up with the astonishing energy waste of at least 500 Megawatts per week! The ‘Economist’ recently ran a story about how “Americans simply by buying more efficient refrigerators have come to save more than 200 terawatt hours annually or 80 power plants worth”.
Then during a particularly boring presentation I started contemplating a nice sauna later that day. But then I recalled that Finland alone has some 1.3 million electric saunas guzzling on an average 6KW of energy. So if we take a weekly usage of one hour at least, you run up an incredible figure of 7,800MW per week just to fire up those electric saunas. Add to this all the electricity used up by saunas in the other Nordic and Baltic countries and we are staring at rather staggering numbers!
Two further interesting observations from the Stockholm conference before I get on to the real issues. Firstly, a rather pompous ‘Grandee’ from Hong Kong / China, who was a keynote speaker, actually made a presentation to suggest that there was absolutely no basis for all this talk about global warming (echoing the questionable writings of Bjorn Lornborg , a Danish Political scientist) and that the IPCC and the scientists of the world had got it all wrong and not much time and effort should be spent on the subject! This prompted the Bangladeshi speaker to caustically suggest that if the IPCC has got it right and no immediate action was taken, Bangladesh along with the Maldives and Kiribati will not exist a decade from now. And then as a horrible reminder, even whilst we were in Stockholm, ‘Nargis’ struck Burma with unprecedented ferocity!
Secondly, in the evening when we, the invited speakers were being driven (in numerous Volvo cars, not buses or electric vehicles) to and from the City Hall (walking distance by normal standards), we noted that most of the large offices and buildings were more than well illuminated long after work had ceased for the day. Much like any large international metropolitan city. Oh, the hypocrisy of it all! All the more galling as I finish this piece on "World Environment Day”.
How many of us are aware that some 25% of the electrical power used by home electronics is consumed when they are not in use. This ‘couch potato’ world just cannot do without its remote controls! Millions of all kinds of gadgets from computers, to TV and music systems are forever on ‘standby’ mode just to keep the clocks on the appliances running and saving the average punter the effort of walking up to the appliance to start it up. Mercifully, modern electronics has now made it possible for power outlets to detect if a plugged in appliance has gone to ‘sleep’ and then cutting off power to that appliance. Some countries are even contemplating banning the ‘standby mode’ altogether.
Add to this the other absurdities needlessly using up electric power. Electrical treadmills especially those with TVs /DVD players (why can’t one just walk and take in the scenery?), electrical toothbrushes and shavers, electrical clocks, golf buggies needing electrical recharging etc. I am sure readers of this column could easily add to this list.
Let me revert to the usage of energy efficient lights. In India companies have recently started implementing some very unique schemes. The basic business model is for the companies to fund the entire cost above 2.5 cents of a new CFL light replacing an existing incandescent lamp in collaboration with the local electricity utility. Their earnings then come out of a part of the energy savings (ESCO model) plus from the ‘Certified Reductions (CER s)’ carbon trading under the Clean Development Mechanism. I am sure there are other profitable business models for energy conservation in lighting similar to the Indian one and the Bangladesh one for solar powered LED lighting.
For those of us who believe computers are the ultimate in ‘clean tech’ here is an eye opener. Large Data Centres or ‘server farms’ are turning out to be massive energy guzzlers. The big data centers already consume about the same power as an aluminum smelter. According to the ‘Economist’, “Data Centres consumed 0.6% of the world’s electricity in 2000 and 1% in 2005. Globally they are responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands……. If today’s trends hold these emissions will have grown four fold by 2020, reaching 670m tonnes. By some estimates the carbon footprint of cloud computing will then be larger than that of aviation.” So why does this world still try to sell new computers and servers on the basis of higher processing powers and faster speeds and not on lowest power consumption.
Mercifully, electronics manufacturing is not quite as pervasive as ‘cloud computing’, but Tim Fryer in his excellent piece of 2 June 2008 Unfair fuel and the future is bang on when he decries the energy inefficiency of much of the equipment that the industry currently uses. It would be extremely interesting to know how much energy is used by all the wave / reflow soldering equipment and diffusion furnaces worldwide! I reckon that the years of cheap energy availability considerably deadened the need for reviewing processes and production equipment re-designing. Much like what the Managing Director of Electrolux talked about. To me it appears to be the consumer equivalent of using energy guzzling Ranges when an efficient low powered microwave oven could quite easily have done the job.
To conclude then, it is all very well to rail against the usurious oil traders but should we not first get rid of our own hypocrisy about energy conservation and energy efficiency? I am certain that if only a fraction of the billions of dollars being spent on a Middle Eastern misadventure were allocated to developing technologies and commercializing the likes of Organic LED’s and thin film solar cells, our friends in Bangladesh, Maldives and Kiribati would have been a lot safer.
Years of availability of cheap energy based on fossil fuels somehow made us forget that the energy produced in a single second is enough to meet the needs of humanity for 2000 years. According to ‘Renewable Energy World’ magazine, the surface of the earth receives an amount of solar energy equivalent to roughly 10,000 times the world energy demand. And for those otherwise inclined, perhaps, as the famous song goes, “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind” !
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