Uncomfortable Seating

This past week at Supercomputing '09, I had the surprising pleasure of listening to Al Gore, "the man who used to be the next President of the United States" (his joke, not mine). I say it was surprising not because I didn't expect him to be there, but rather because I didn't expect to enjoy it so much. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when a career politician is good at rhetoric. In any event, Mr. Gore was an appropriate speaker for a conference where "Green Computing" was a key focus, and his talk at the plenary session was both well attended and entertaining.

For context, I am a Global Warming skeptic -- I think that the measurement system is both faulty and incomplete (see this article from Analog for some thoughts on this), and that many of our proposed responses are not well thought out. Having said this, I think Gore was worth listening to, albeit not for the reasons one might think. For my own part, I think it is energy use, and not carbon emissions, that should be our real concern.

Consider, for example, the transport efficiency of your modern automobile. A typical internal-combustion engine might be 40% - 50% efficient if properly tuned and maintained. If we use that engine as part of a 3000-pound automobile carrying two adults, only 10% of the mass being moved is actually contributing to our goal of moving two people across town. This gives us 4% overall efficiency - or a waste of 96% of the fuel being consumed.

This result is significantly lower than the 99.2% quoted by Gore in his talk, but it's still a very large percentage. And even if you think that carbon emissions are essentially irrelevant, and variation in solar output is as likely to create the next ice age as it is to trigger melting ice caps, wasting that much energy should get your attention. Consider:

• The earth has an energy balance that is predominantly based on the quantity of energy being added by the sun, less the quantity being radiated into space.


• Barring the speculative future discovery of zero-point energy, this energy is finite in quantity. (see the First Law of Thermodynamics)


• Energy that is released into our system as heat is not available for other purposes, and some fraction of it will be released into space.


• Every time we convert energy from one form to another, some of it gets lost to entropy (see the Second Law of Thermodynamics), which for all practical purposes means wasted heat.

Within this framework, fossil fuels are one method for long-term storage of solar energy. If we choose to use that energy to drive to work today, it won't be available for use tomorrow.

As a technical geek, I think that solar panels are cool. I also think that wind farms are a much better choice than the current system of coal farms that are presently hurting our northeast sugar maple trees with acid rain. That said, neither of these directly impacts the planetary energy balance to the degree that efficiency improvements can do today.

I look forward to the effects that ideas like smart grid will have on customer use of energy. As W. E. Deming reminded us long ago, "what gets measured gets done." Once we can easily see how much energy they are throwing away, will we perhaps start using it better?