The New York Times earlier this week carried a story on how energy consumption by data centers is becoming a major and measurable problem worldwide:
In the United States alone, those data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of the country’s electricity use in 2006 — more than the entire state of Massachusetts. And their power use could nearly double over five years, according to government reports.
Low-Power Design deliberately picked up the torch from Portable Design, which was all about energy efficient design. Looking at the macro-level implications—as evidenced by the data center example above—we realized that “green engineering” is all about creating energy-efficient designs. The power management techniques first developed for portable devices apply equally well to their plugged-in brethren. Now we won’t ignore you if your product doesn’t run off a battery. In fact you get bonus points if it uses less power than the state of Massachusetts (Rhode Island, even)!
Green engineering isn’t just good design, it can also save your customers a lot of green–as in money.
We cover the green angle in our news section in order to increase our readers’ awareness of the importance of the work they’re doing. But at heart we’re a design book, trying to provide the tools to help our readers get the job done. If you have a suggestion for how we can do a better job of it, please let us know.