While the dainty power needs of the new Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e desktop machine are laudable—it can be powered by an optional solar panel alone (although who knows how big it might be)—the press release announcing the desktop PC underlines both how little inexpensive the electricity we pull from the mains really is:
• A user could save, on average, more than $20 a year in energy costs and the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions created by two round-trip plane flights from Boston to New York.• A customer deploying as few as 50 desktops could expect to save more than $1,000 a year in energy costs alone. And it could help avoid more than 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
…
2 Based on Lenovo and TBR calculations using a single AMD Athlon 64 X2-based processor. Based on a 5% per year increase in electricity rates and on a daily PC usage pattern that includes 70% of time spent in sleep state, 5% of time spent in idle and 25% of time spent in an operational state. Average electricity price based on American 2007 average retail price 8.37 cents per kilowatt hour.
It’s always great to save power where you can, but it’s funny to think that a person might spend $400 on what is one of the most energy effecient desktops around only to save, say, sixty bucks in power costs over the lifecycle of the machine.
Also, while we’re on the subject, this line is sort of bullshit:
the ThinkCentre A61e desktop uses up to 90 percent reusable/recyclable materials as well as 90 percent recyclable packaging
I hate it when people sneak in “reusable” and “recyclable” instead of “reused” and “recycled.” Sure, better that we buy things that we can then go on to recycle, but producing products that can be recycled is a fair jump away from things that are made from recycled materials.
Press Release [BusinessWire via Engadget]
