To refresh your minds, I am turning off my computer to see how much energy I can save. I wanted to do this because I know that phantom energy, power usage while being plugged in, can be rather significant in terms of energy. I found that in my regular usage my computer is on for 11.5 hrs while I am idle and during the PSP project my idle time changed to 5.25 hrs, a savings of more than 50%. From this I calculated that I had 29.3 lbs CO2/Yr, which seems low but this is just for one laptop. If we scale this to Stanford students, more than 380000 lbs Co2/Yr can be saved. If we scale this to more than just laptops think of the impact!!
I learned a lot from this PSP. I learned that simply turning off and unplugging appliances can be a huge impact to saving energy. Beyond that, I learned that education is largely importatnt in maintaining sustainability sustainable. This I think is the first step to keep green alive…If we can show the impact of our everyday activities we can hopefully engage them in minimizing energy costs. Hopefully with the advancement of technology, we can have sustainable soultions that do not change the convenience of consumer behavior.
