Everybody loves cups of tea (or, if you prefer, coffee). Boiling the kettle to make those cups of caffeinated goodness takes energy, something which we’re constantly trying to use less of. Which is why when I discovered some of the University’s energy data I knew what had to be done.
You can now take a look at the electricity consumption of various University buildings expressed as how many cups of tea you could make with the same amount of energy. There’s even a pretty graph which shows how energy use fluctuates over the last 24 hours.
Open data is good – it lets us throw things like this together in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
Hi Nick
Interestingly, I think you’ll find an audit which looks at the complete life cycle energy which goes into blogging, search engines, social media or just general data and internet access is quite illuminating.
Back in 2003, the rough calculation was that just the basic storage cost of 10MB of data equated to approximately 0.5kg of coal consumption per annum, which makes internet and computer usage as big a global carbon consumer as any heavy industry. So, the upshot is that there is a tradeoff between the energy savings made by opening up (for example) the University’s energy data vs the extra energy consumed in its analysis, storage and dissemination. For example, saving say 500kWh of energy across an institution can be completely negated if the data or information becomes popular and widely used across the Net.
I think that this would make an excellent research project proposal tying together power, energy, social computing and open data.
Cheers Paul