The peer-reviewed journal Energy Efficiency just published our commentary about networked standby power and the need for product-specific government industry interactions when setting voluntary targets and standards. Networked standby is power used by devices to maintain a network connection, and some states and countries are considering regulating it using what
Read moreOur latest book was just released online today by IOP Publishing (The Institute of Physics). It’s called Solving Climate Change: A Guide for Learners and Leaders. The publisher’s page for the book is https://doi.org/10.1088/978-0-7503-4032-8. This textbook grew out of a course my colleague
Read moreOur latest article on scenario decomposition tools came out in Environmental Modeling and Software in September 2022: Koomey, Jonathan, Zachary Schmidt, Karl Hausker, and Dan Lashof. 2022. “Exploring the black box: Applying macro decomposition tools for scenario comparisons.” Environmental Modeling and Software. vol. 155, September. [https://doi.org/10.1016/
Read moreRegular readers know that I’ve studied the history of computing for a very long time. About four years ago (November 17, 2017) I had the good fortune to visit Bletchley Park and the UK’s National Museum of Computing, outside of London. They are contiguously located, so it was
Read moreI and Professor Eric Masanet of UC Santa Barbara have a new commentary article out today in the refereed journal Joule. It explores four common pitfalls that cause researchers and commentators to exaggerate information technology electricity use and emissions, and suggests four ways industry and researchers can avoid spreading such
Read moreMy keynote talk today for the iTherm 2021 technical conference is an expansion of points made in a commentary article by me and Professor Eric Masanet, UCSB, which is “in press” at Joule right now (more when that’s published). I presented nine different high-profile misconceptions about electricity use and
Read moreMy talk was titled “Information and communications technology (ICT) and the energy/climate transition”, and I presented it today (November 24, 2020) at the 3rd Vienna Energy Strategy Dialogue, on the Implications of the Global Energy Transition”, Vienna, Austria. The key points: • Direct electricity used by ICT is modest and
Read moreBack in 2015, Professor Richard Hirsh (Virginia Tech) and I published the following article in The Electricity Journal, documenting trends in US primary energy, electricity, and real (inflation-adjusted) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through 2014: Hirsh, Richard F., and Jonathan G. Koomey. 2015. “Electricity Consumption and Economic Growth: A New Relationship
Read moreSafety warning: This project involves dry ice, which can really damage your skin if you make direct contact with it. If you attempt this activity, use appropriate safety precautions (like oven mitts and tongs to move the dry ice) When I was a kid I always wanted to make a
Read moreI had at some point bookmarked this 2012 article containing a story from BP about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and saving money. I’m posting it here now because the lesson it teaches is still important and relevant. BP thought its efforts to reduce GHG emissions would cost money,
Read moreOur article on global data center electricity use is out today (February 28, 2020) in Science Magazine as a Policy Forum article. The intro of the article gives context: 123556 Key findings: • Total global data center electricity use increased by only 6% from 2010 to 2018, even as the number
Read moreSam Naffziger of AMD and I just published our report on the efficiency of supercomputers over time. Here’s the abstract: The energy efficiency of computing devices is a topic of ongoing research and public interest. While trends in the efficiency of laptops and desktops have been well studied, there
Read moreIn October 2019, many news outlets (including Phys.org) reported that watching half an hour of Netflix would emit the same amount of carbon dioxide (1.6 kg) as driving four miles. This appears to be yet another amazing “factoid” about information technology’s environmental footprint that has little relationship
Read moreThe Museum of American Heritage is a fantastic independent museum in Palo Alto, California. We needed a short activity to pass the time (we were in Palo Alto for coding lessons for one of our boys) and I discovered this place online. What a find it is! The museum is
Read moreA couple of weeks ago, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released emissions scenarios related to the World Energy Outlook (WEO). We’ve used our spreadsheets to disentangle the drivers for those 2019 scenarios. We express the results in what we call a “dashboard of key drivers” (see below). The 2019
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