The New Dracula-Energy Sucking Standby Mode

clipped from wbztv.com A force as insidious as Dracula is quietly sucking a nickel of every dollar's worth of the electricity that seeps from your home's outlets nsert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That's vampire electronics. Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as ``standby mode'' rather than shutting it off: That's vampire electronics The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, The percentage could rise to 20 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The International Energy Agency has estimated standby energy use by vampire electronics at 200 to 400 terawatt-hours a year. The entire country of Italy consumes about 300 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, according to the agency "About 40 percent of the electricity being used to power your home electronics is consumed while they are in that standby mode,

small changes add up to big energy savings

clipped from environment.newscientist.com Power-generating buoys shelter in the deep They look a bit like underwater mines, but they have a far less sinister purpose – the first of these submarine wave-energy devices should sprout up off the UK coast in 2008. AWS Ocean Energy has developed an underwater buoy that harnesses wave energy from 50 metres below the surface. The British company says that because the entire device is underwater, it does not suffer from storms in the way that other wave-power devices do, and will not interfere with shipping.

wireless electricity: Cable Free Power Arrives

It is a great achievement, we can transmit electricity through air.
WiTricity: wireless electricity

clipped from blog.wired.com WiTricity: Cable Free Power Arrives MIT physicist Marin Soljacic has managed to get around the biggest problem with transmitting power through the air; waste. Throwing power out in all directions means that nearly all of it remains unused. The fix? Magnetic resonance. Two 20 inch coils were designed to resonate with one another, with one hooked up to the power supply and the other to a light bulb. As the magnetic fields interact weakly with most other materials, the power can go through walls and more importantly, doesn't affect the human body. The efficiency is still only around 40%, but that's a big leap over past attempts. They are close to getting 100 Watts on the receiving end, which is enough to juice up a laptop (the MacBook, for instance, sucks 85 Watts from it's adapter). For more on the science behind this, see the article at Wired Science. Scientists light bulb with "wireless electricity" [Xinhua] Wireless Energy Could Signal the End of Power Cords [Wired Science]

Power Savings Guide for PCs

clipped from www.tomshardware.com clipped from www.tomshardware.com In short, it is possible to save as little as 2 W and as much as 40 W just by a smart component choice. Energy-saving features such as AMD's Cool'n'Quiet or Intel's Enhanced SpeedStep reduce the processor clock speed and voltage, which saves up to 50 W The largest potential to save energy is hidden in the graphics card The GeForce 8800 GTS requires 40-65 W more than a GeForce 7800 GT, which is more than the total power requirement of a notebook PC or a 20" TFT display.