Monday, October 15, 2007

Energy Flow

I had a chance to visit the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge last week, and among the many inspiring things I saw was this beautiful information graphic - albeit not for its content - illustrating the total energy flow in and out of the U.S. in 2005. (Click to enlarge - Energy in Quadrillion Btu). The image was used in a presentation on sustainable architecture by Kent Larson.



Two things to notice in the illustration are the overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels, and that nearly two thirds of all petroleum/crude oil consumed is imported. When looking for the image, I came across several other equally powerful visualizations of energy use, such as the one below which illustrates the shocking amount of energy lost when converting fossil fuels to electricity.



It felt appropriate to post this on Blog Action Day.



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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Blackle update

An update on my Blackle post from yesterday. Sadly, a little more digging suggests that (unfortunately) this will only make a difference for CRT monitors, which consume 74 Watts to display a white screen versus 59 Watts to display a black screen. The power consumption of LCDs is not affected by the colors displayed on screen. Changing the display brightness seems to be the only way to conserve energy on an LCD. On a positive note, while Blackle won't help LCD users save power, LCDs are significantly more energy efficient than CRT's overall.

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posted by Mike @ 10:38 PM   |   Permalink                                        Previous |  Next