Palm Pilots, not Californians, are the real electricity hogs 2001-02-08

by Mike Ullmann Journal Reporter

We have met the energy enemy, and it's in our jacket pockets.

``Do you know how much energy it takes to run a Palm Pilot?'' asks John Ellis, the former boss of Puget Sound Energy.

The astounding answer: One Palm equals one refrigerator, in terms of total energy used.

``It's unbelievable,'' Ellis said.

It's so unbelievable, in fact, that the man who originally crunched that number says nothing else in his career has so grabbed people's attention, especially since it was published last fall in the Wall Street Journal.

``The refrigerator is the one that everybody remembers,'' said Mark P. Mills, co-editor of Digital Power Report.

``There is nothing more dramatic, or more annoying to people who don't believe it.''

It's true, insists Mills, who is also president of Mills-McCarthy & Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based research-consulting firm that specializes in technology assessment and forecasting.

To get that number, Mills and his researchers added together every Palm-related cost imaginable, including -- most critically -- the infrastructure to wirelessly connect it to the Internet.

He included everything from the energy used to manufacture the Palm's innards -- a silicon microprocessor -- to the telephone lines, server farms and routers that put Palm's latest models online.

The result: Total energy used by one Palm is between 1,000 and 2,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, Mills said.

Puget Sound Energy estimates a 17.5-cubic-foot frost-free refrigerator uses 1,596 kilowatt hours per year, at a cost of about $112.

Mills' larger point is that our burgeoning high-tech world is almost unbelievably power hungry.

``You add it all up and you find, we discovered, that the information part of our economy was consuming roughly 10 percent of the nation's electricity,'' Mills said.

``The Palm Pilot is a great poster child for that message.''

It's a message whose impact is difficult to exaggerate.

In Oregon, where the high-tech industry is the fastest-growing consumer of electricity in the state, the Oregonian newspaper reported last month that the electricity used to produce one silicon chip could power a typical home for a month.

And the Eastside Journal reported in December that so many new Internet server farms are proposed here that their electricity demands would nearly equal that of Seattle.

Mike Ullmann can be reached at mike.ullmann@eastsidejournal.com or 425-452-1072.

http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/43920

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 09, 2001

Answers

``Do you know how much energy it takes to run a Palm Pilot?'' asks John Ellis, the former boss of Puget Sound Energy.

The astounding answer: One Palm equals one refrigerator, in terms of total energy used.

This should be astounding, because it's thoroughly bogus. This "fact" compares the total running + lifecycle + infrastructure energy costs of a Palm with just the running costs of a refrigerator. A fair comparison would be to add in the lifecycle + infrastructure energy costs of the fridge -- smelting the steel and copper, manufacturing, warehousing, transporting, disposal, etc. etc. But that wouldn't produce the desired "dramatic" headlines.

-- Barb Knox (barbara-knox@iname.com), February 09, 2001.

Story went way off course concerning Palm Pilots 2001-02-10

By John M. Fluke Jr.

The Palm Pilot story in the Feb. 8 Journal is either willful, or at least negligent, misrepresentation of the facts. Here's why:

1. The local PC's with which Palm Pilots synchronize are only involved in that process for a few dozen seconds a day per Palm Pilot.

2. The Internet infrastructure is running 24 hours a day and local PC's are on at least during the work day, whether Palm Pilots are synchronizing or not.

3. If PC owners leave their PC's off when out and about connecting wirelessly to the Internet, they are using a device that runs for days on two AAA batteries or about 1/5000th of the power consumed by their PC. It would be really great if everyone turned off their PC's and used their Palm Pilots for Internet access.

4. The most common wireless connection used by Palm Pilots is packet data that uses ``dead time'' on the wireless system.

5. It is not possible to detect any change in power consumption by the wireless and Internet infrastructures whether there are zero or one million Palm Pilots attached.

6. The analysis failed to include the energy consumed in extracting transporting and processing the raw materials, manufacturing the refrigerator's subassemblies, its final assembly, transportation to a central warehouse, then to a retail store, then to the end user's home. Since your Palm Pilot story included energy used by the infrastructure that supports its functionality, you should also include the refrigerator's share of the original cost to manufacture and install everything from building and operating power plants and the power grid to the cost of manufacturing and installing the refrigerator's wiring in the home.

7. While you excluded all but direct annual operating energy used by the refrigerator, you represented that the one-time energy consumption to create a particular Palm Pilot is appropriately included as a component of its annual operating energy demand.

8. You failed to take into account the energy saved by a Palm Pilot by virtue of its elimination of the user's Franklin Day Planner including the cutting of trees, processing them into paper, printing and packaging the Day Planner product, and all the transportation steps between raw materials extraction and final delivery into the end user's hands.

9. Lastly, you make no mention of the growing level of telecommuting and tele-shopping -- an especially critical emerging practice in our crowed highway community.

Finally, what's your point? Should everyone throw out their Palm Pilots?

You would do our community a much greater service by explaining, for example, why California's power deregulation was not deregulation at all. Investor-owned utilities were required to sell all of their generating capacity while public utilities were allowed to opt out of this requirement (which most of them did).

While the wholesale price of electric energy was allowed to float, the retail price was fixed by the state. Thus, the force of the consumer was disabled from working in the market, since the consumer was not confronted with the real cost of power. Worse still, influenced particularly by the ``green'' power producers and the new owners of the former private power generators, the wholesale price was left to be set mostly by the spot market.

Most consumers do respond quickly when the cost they pay changes.

If it goes up, they find alternative ways; if it goes down, they maintain their old behavior. It's the law of supply and demand.

However, there has been no significant new supply created, hence when demand exceeds supply, the price goes up. Conservation will only work if the consumer directly pays the actual price. When we say market force we really mean that the consumer has choices: alternative sources or use less of any good or service that is experiencing a rising price.

Somehow, legislators thought they were doing consumers a big favor by shielding them from reality, yet, at the same time expecting consumers to behave responsibly and respond to billboards begging them to conserve for the ``Fatherland.'' It takes a badly misinformed electorate to keep sending naive social theorists like this bunch to Sacramento. Publications like yours are the only way to bring common sense back into the making of public policy.

The same third-party payer practice that has sent our health care costs to 14 percent of GDP is now in place in California's electric power system. Wait until Californians are plugging their cars in the wall to charge them each night. Then they will really know what an energy crisis is.

John M. Fluke Jr. is chairman of Fluke Capital Management.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- South County Journal 600 South Washington, Kent WA 98032

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 10, 2001.