Energy awareness, by human?
Climate change and energy shortage, potentially, are demanding people to think twice now when they want to switch on their heating or air-conditioning. Rightly so, human has been too wasteful for too long. Gas guzzling vehicles for style, for recognition. Electronic equipments switched on all day long for no good reasons. My company has just participated in the “Big Switch Off” this weekend to see how much energy companies have wasted had they not switched off unused equipments over the weekend.
Question is, do we actually need such studies to learn that we should be switching off unused equipments? It does not matter how much current the equipment draws. If it is not needed, turn it off! Simple as that. Sometimes it is just frustrating to see human’s ignorant behaviours. Of course companies would want to save their fuel bills, especially now when the economy is doing so badly, jobs cutting everywhere, everyday. But it is when it becomes the companies’ job to persuade employees to save energy that it seems a bit laughable.
It’s the same at home. There are products in the market where people can plug them onto their power sockets to see how much energy they are consuming on their devices before they will decide whether or not they will want to use less of those devices, for example when not needed! They want information in their face before they will consider changing their behaviours. Switching off things is just too “time-consuming”, sigh, as if most of these people are always so occupied.
With such inconsiderate human behaviour, it almost becomes inevitable that it makes sense to “institutionalise” plans to save energy. For example new buildings to be built need to meet certain level of energy efficiency criteria before they will be approved. Good news is this will present opportunities and incentives for builders to come up with better building designs that are energy efficient, sustainable and environmental friendly. It is true that wireless sensor networks will probably come in quite handy in helping to improve building design. But I think it will mostly be in the arena of improving comfort rather than energy efficiency, unfortunately. Afterall building materials are limited and are well studied by the construction industry already?
