Real Data
Just read a CNET article about electricity usage in the computer industry. The short story is that rising energy costs, inefficient technology, and rising demand have conspired to raise costs to the point where the computer industry views it as a serious problem.
The phrase which caught my eye in particular was this:
The first step, several at the conference agreed, is to develop a useful common measurement of system performance. The industry could then balance that against power consumption, to judge how bad the power efficiency problem is and how effective solutions might be.
Real data is important. Real data helps you determine how bad the problem is, and is necessary to measure your progress and identify change.
However, the process of measuring first requires an amount of assessing, which is in my mind more valuable than the actual numbers spat out when measuring. Assessing a system requires looking at it in different ways from when it was created. You can spot inefficiencies, bottlenecks, redundancies, and a host of other problems and opportunities.
I’m interested in this article because I’ve been looking at assessing the use of public transportation and the associated per-person emissions. It seems to me that the tools we currently use to assess situations in the civic space, such as emissions or water or electricity meters, are rather inexact tools. That is, the electricity meter doesn’t tell you which device uses the most electricity, nor does the water meter tell you which faucet is leaking. And any emissions test done on a biennial basis is missing out on a granularity which modern technology affords.
So it seems to me that any attempt to reduce emissions requires essentially the same process as the computer industry is beginning to undertake: assess the situation, use measurements to determine how bad the problem is, and measure the results for positive or negative change.
The question, though, is HOW, and that’s what I’m focusing on right now. The computer industry has it relatively easy, in that everything is in one place and (relatively speaking) standardized. Other things in life aren’t quite as conveniently arranged.