Earth Hour Can Use Notebook Or Not?

Earth Hour this year is happening next Saturday 28th March 2009 from 8:30pm to 9:30pm. During this hour, you’re encouraged to switch off non-essential lights and electrical appliances. Class 95 was talking about no TV, oh dear, what are we going to do during that one hour? Then I was talking about it with my colleagues. Someone quipped, should be able to use notebook right? Just run off the batteries, don’t need to plug into the wall socket for power!

I guess that should be okay eh. But I’m sure the Earth Hour purists would disagree. Batteries, after all, are probably not very environmentally friendly anyway.

The purpose of Earth Hour, in case you’re not yet aware, is to raise awareness of the need to take action on climate change. It was a movement that started in Australia in 2007. It became an international event in 2008. This year, they have a very ambitious goal. They are targeting to get 1 billion votes. You are voting for Earth by switching off your non-essential lights and electrical appliances.

You can find out more information at these websites: Earth Hour and Vote Earth.

Part of my work involves running data centres. In data centre circles, green is a very big thing. It’s not so much because data centre operators are so earth friendly (although they might be, of course), but because the need to go green. Data centres are running out of space, or running out of available power supply, so they need to optimize. Pack more servers, or processing power, into the same space or using the same amount of power. Electricity is also getting pretty costly, so that’s also an incentive to cut operating costs. Particularly if you consider the humongous amounts of power consumed by cooling systems in a data centre to deal with the heat generated by modern high density computers.

I don’t know what I’d be doing next Saturday night. In case I don’t turn off my lights, or switch off my appliances… well, at least I will say that I did my little bit by spreading the word to you!