| Yes, its astounding how much energy is used by industry. I was involved in a sad industrial energy debacle, at a job long ago. We were making electric arc furnace controllers. An electric arc furnace is commonly used to recycle metal. Think of large pencil leads (size of your thigh) stuck through an insulated lid over a large vat of old bicycles, water softeners, bedframes etc - recycled metal. By creating an arc between the three phases of the electrodes and the pile of metal and controlling the current and length of the arc, considerable energy can be transferred to the metal as heat. Pretty efficient. Out beta test site complained that they'd be running a shift and notice the arc was misbehaving every morning - failing to moderate the arc length properly. Resulting in most of the energy going into the electrodes and eroding them away. What was going on? By having an engineer sit there on an overnight shift, we discovered that the desktop computer running the algorithm was going into 'power save' mode, stopping the app from responding to inputs and leaving the furnace electrodes stalled. We estimated that this 30MW furnace wasted as much energy over the week, as 'power save' mode on PCs saved in all of America for a year. Think about it. It would have been better if Microsoft had never invented Power Save mode. More electricity would have been saved that year. That's how much industrial power matters, and how little your app matters. |