A few years ago I learned that a single google search requires enough energy to light a bulb for 30 seconds. I was shocked...
Have you ever seen a Google server station? Probably not, because they are very well hidden and built close to small lakes. The reason is that Google needs a lot of water to cool them.
When searching around the web for the impact of Bioinformatics, I found out that the training of ChatGPT (GPT 3) required approximately 700 000 liters of water.
It is often said that a single -80 freezer consumes as much energy as an entire family home. In essence, our equipment as well as the analysis of our data needs significant amounts of energy. Nevertheless, these impacts often remain hidden because as scientists we do not see the energy bill each month.
This is why we will unravel how to reduce your energy computions.
Today's Lesson: How To Save Energy
Finding out how you can decrease electricity bills.
Number Of The Day
If you bought a -80 freezer with a volume of around 700L a decade ago, it would have consumed 67% more energy than the models do today. Indeed, the freezer with the lowest energy consumption that is currently available is produced by phcbi. It runs at about 5,4 kW/h per day.
67 %
How To Reduce Energy Consumption
To reduce electricity bills in your laboratory, you can:
A) Turn off equipment
B) Reduce the running time of machines
B) Buy equipment that has lower consumption or smart stand-by modes. However, the actual footprint of your laboratory not only depends on how much energy you need, but also how this energy is generated. That means your electricity provider is an important factor. For example, coal is much more environmentally harmful than energy generated as hydroelectricity (with water from rivers).
By TuomoS - shared on Wikimedia. Lifecycle CO2-equivalents basically refer to the global warming potential measured by life-cycle analysis.
As a result, carbon footprints (as it was calculated for computational approaches) can vary more than 10-fold depending on where the energy is consumed. Thus, the location of your laboratory but also of the severs you use matters – for computations, using cloud services can sometimes by advisable.
But how can you reduce energy consumption in your laboratory?
Without boring you with all the common stuff, here are some insights, that might be less well known:
Applying The Knowledge
When reviewing which machines can be safely turned off, make a list of each piece of equipment and share it with ALL your colleagues to make sure everybody is aware.
Also, have you ever heard of outlet timers? These can be very helpful to assure that equipment is automatically turned off overnight or during weekends.
Some outlet timers you can get for 5-15 bugs. You can easily order them online.
Try to be lean - using as small amounts of ice as possible and reducing the time freezer and fridge doors are left open. Defrosting it regularly and throwing away unnecessary samples might take time but will prevent freezer failures due to overload in the future. The same counts for deleting old Emails in inboxes and data on severs. And here is what few consider: While you want to store your data on a cloud, you want to have the safety copies on a hard drive. On the one hand that significantly reduces energy consumption from the severs and secondly, it is best practice – if the servers fail or are hacked, your data is gone, no matter how many copies you have.
Consider that shutting your sash can save thousands of dollars every year (moer here, here and here). Now, WALDNER has also a fume hood that automatically shuts the sash after a certain time. For everyone else, there is a little sticker that became quite famous. It reminds you to shut the sash of your fume hood or biosafety cabintes (little story: this was developed by researchers at two universities unknowingly of each other at the same time)
Saving energy through purchasing? Indeed, there is the possibility to order polymerases and primers that are shipped at ambient temperatures. Similarly, there are some newer options for e.g., cell culture medium that can be stored at room temperature (for example from Thermo-Fisher).
Finally, here is an interesting argument to convince your colleagues. When you set the holding temperature of your PCR cycler from 4 to 10-12°C, you will not only save energy but you also reduce the workload and the build up of condensation water, therefore, increasing the life-time of your machine.
Take Away
Often, we leave equipment turned on because we do not see the effect of energy consumption. A change mindset might do the job most effectively. What worked best for me is instead of trying to remember when to turn things "off" to switch to thinking about when to turn them "on". That means if a piece of equipment was running, I would automatically notice it - my default was: “isn't everything normally off - who is using that piece of equipment?”. When searching for new equipment, compare the energy consumption. And to convince colleagues, mention the longer life-times and reduced expenses - sometimes you can convince faculty to give you some money back they deduct from your grants for paying electricity bills.
Upcoming Lesson:
How To Convince Colleagues And Lab-Mates.
Weekly Check (It) Out
Green Your Lab is an initiative that shares some interesting information about sustainable labs. I have been working with their co-founder Fanny quite a bit – a very energetic and fascinating person. I can only advise to check them out – they cooled a bit down in terms of current activities but their information is very well curated!
Asking You
If a -80 freezer takes about 5-16kW/h a day, how much does an open fume hood need on average?
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