Using data from a 2005 report by the US Dept of Energy, GoodMagazine has produced this graphic showing how much power various appliances use when left in standby mode (e.g. the state your TV’s in when you use the remote to turn it off). Even when your household appliances are turned off, most are still using some electricity. And in fact, one recent study, as reported in the Times UK Online, found that standby modes on electronic devices account for 8% of all British domestic power consumption.

Appliances can be either in passive standby mode (the clock on the microwave is still ticking) or active standby mode (the VCR is off, but programmed to record something). The Vampire Energy Chart will show you how much money these energy-sucking appliances leech (in KWh) and how much it costs you (US$ at 0.11c per KWh) – check it out; the red lines indicate passive standby mode and the blue lines active standby.

There was a very interesting, and concerning, article published earlier this week in InformationWeek. Forrester Research has made public a study of U.S. consumer electronics buyers that suggests that there's an emerging environmentally conscious group that's willing to pay more for green products.

The study claims 12% of U.S. adults, or 25 million Americans, are willing to pay extra for gadgets that use less energy or come from a company that approaches product design with the environment in mind and make up the vanguard of an emerging consumer market that will be an attractive target for technology companies.

Along with some other interesting statistics, among PC brands the study lists “Apple's customer base [as] the greenest, with 17% of its customers in the bright green category”. And this is the part that concerns me. Is this the same Apple that was slammed by Greenpeace for its lack of responsible green policies, resulting in Steve Jobs coming out with a statement vowing to clean up their act, only to receive another rebuke months later for not sticking to what they promised?

If you have a look over near the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, you’ll see we’ve added a new widget. CO2Stats is a free tool that monitors and offsets your blog or web site's carbon dioxide emissions by calculating how much power site visitors are consuming to view it. For each pound of CO2 resulting from site traffic, the CO2Stats Project purchases carbon offsets from Sustainable Travel International that benefit the environment.

Now, there isn’t much info on how they calculate how much power each visitor uses while visiting the site (I guess it’s through averages), but it seems like a good idea and has taken off by all accounts.

Twice-yearly TOP500 puts out a list of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing, with inclusion in the list having become a highly sought after prize.

For decades now, the notion of ‘performance’ has been synonymous with ‘speed’ (as measured in FLOPS, short for floating-point operations per second). What this has led to is the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. As a consequence, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership of a supercomputer, with costs running as high as US$1m to US$4m per year to operate a mega system.