The Local Cooling website wants us to contribute to the prevention of further climate change by monitoring the power settings on our computers:
More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we could just improve the efficiency of how we use our PCs, the savings in energy costs would be over $3 billion dollars! The CO2 emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car.
I have installed the Local Cooling software on my computer to see if I can make a difference. I have one problem in that my computer has two monitors, and one of them doesn’t like to be shut down prematurely. It will often refuse to come back on, and will generally make my life difficult if I try to tweak it in any way. I’m going to give this a shot, though, and see what happens. I’ll report back here if I have any problems.
You can download the software for your own computer here:
