HP: A big player with big ideas

As one of the major hardware manufacturers, HP has a lot of leverage when it comes to green ideas. As company, they are very committed to their sustainability goals and have been a leading voice in that space for a while.

In a recent AMR article, it is pointed out that HP does not only consider electricity consumption during the run time of the hardware, but factors in the entire life cycle of the product. During this evaluation, they foresee that they can reduce their annual CO2 emission by 30 gigatons! Not a bad goal.

Another very nifty idea was to switch laptops internal energy to 12V and take advantage of existing energy sources such as car rechargers. Get this:
"Currently, global sales of notebooks exceed desktop sales and are currently running at around 97 million units annually. Assuming a three-year notebook lifetime and a conservative 20% market growth retrospectively, this implies an installed base of roughly 236 million units. With the typical average power usage levels of 20 watts, and an average daily usage rate of 8 hours, we estimate annual global power usage of notebook to be of the order of 10.4 terawatt hours (that 10.4 million-million watt hours). On average, residential U.S. power rates are 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that’s more than $1B worth of power, power that would have resulted in almost 6 million tons of CO2e being emitted into the atmosphere."

Now cut this down by 12V charge usage:
"Now, picture this: If 30% of all notebook users used the existing free energy available from automotive recharging for 60% of their notebook electricity demand, annual savings could top more than 1.8 trillion watts of energy. That’s enough to support the annual electricity consumption of more than 175,000 U.S. households and a reduction in GHG emissions of more than a million tons of CO2e"

Powerful ideas, going along with an earlier posting to embrace bold ideas to make the change.