Korea goes green with its computers

Pushes for 1W notebook standby and 2W PC standby

Korea's energy efficiecy program

 Amongst rising concerns about global environment (especially about global warming and the need for conserving energy), many governments and corporations are striving to go green by devising new methods of conserving energy. Korea has acknowledged this threat and in its endeavor to go green has become the first government to mandate a maximum power consumption rate for “green” PCs and laptops in standby mode. This ruling means that PCs must consume 2W or less while in standby, and laptops 1W or less, in order to wear the “e-Standby” compliance label. Such a program was already in place since last August, now computers have also been added to this program as there is a growing trend amongst users to buy more than one PC and it holds 1% of total energy usages in worldwide. 

This new limit applies to any laptop or laptop-style device with an integrated power supply of 1,000W or above.  Although, manufacturers are still free to produce devices with above 1W/2W standby consumption, it is believed that the rising awareness levels (with respect to our environment) and demand for greener energy efficient devices will lead to its adoption by all manufacturers.

Manufacturers like Intel claim that their Atom range of processors which are commonly found in netbooks, budget ultraportables and nettops, already have a standby power consumption of less than 1W and many of its recent desktop motherboards also consume less than 1W in standby (earlier would use about 3W in lowest power mode).  Desktop PCs and their monitors are believed to account for 1-percent of the world’s energy use. All this will lead to this – for every 12 million PCs sold, 123 million kilowatt-hours of energy can be saved, resulting in 91 million kilos of global warming gases eliminated.

I personally want this policy to work out; more and more nations should adopt such green policies so that the global environment can be preserved.