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In this story, the NZ Herald reports that there was only 80MW of excess capacity over demand and that if this margin were eroded, cuts would be required.

This has left me wondering whether the seemingly endless hardware PC upgrade cycle might be almost as much to blame for the growing power demand as is the growth in air conditioning units now installed in homes and businesses.

As I type this, I'm stuck in a very small room with two PCs, two monitors and a 1KVA UPS. The amount of heat they poke out (and my monthly power bill) is a clear indication that they're consuming a fair amount of power.

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Although the power consumption per transistor junction has dropped markedly in recent decades, this appears to have been significantly offset by the growing numbers of such junctions in the average PC. Even video cards now have their own complex heat-sinking and fans in order to dissipate the excess power they burn.

Of course there are a number of ways that PC users can reduce the amount of juice their computers consume but I suspect that few of us are actually taking advantage of these.

Firstly, you can reduce the time taken before your screen-saver kicks in. Having a CRT or even an LCD sitting there chewing up valuable power when it's not actually being read is wasteful. And yes, LCDs are a more power-effective display technology than those big 17" or 19" CRTs.

Since a fair percentage of people are bound to be running some flavor of windows, it might pay to check that you're using the power-saving options built into this OS.

There are a raft of power-saving features available from the Windows Control Panel so check them out.

Of course it might be environmentally sensible if more desktop PCs were built around the new CPUs built for portable computers. Their ability to vary clock-speed and power consumption based on whether the processor is idle or actually crunching numbers would save a small but important amount of power in some cases.

Have we been going the wrong way with our hardware perhaps? Focusing on providing *more* power rather than consuming less?

According to some new NASA data (see the headlines below), 2005 may be the warmest year yet on record and this must be a worrying trend. Although even the fastest PC system is responsible for only a few hundred watts, when you multiply that by the massive number of machines out there -- that's a *lot* of power being consumed and turned into heat.

Instead of hugging a tree today, why not just turn your PC off when you're not using it?

Oh, and by the way -- where are all the lighten-up suggestions folks?

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