Synergy: An Energy Monitoring and Visualization System

The key to becoming a more sustainable society is first learning to take responsibility for the role we play in energy consumption. Real-time energy usage gives energy consumers a sense of responsibility over what they can do to accomplish a much larger goal for the planet, and practically speaking, what they can do to lower the cost to their wallets. Synergy is an energy monitoring and visualization system that enables users to gather information about the energy consumption in a building – small or large – and display that data for the user in real-time. The gathered energy usage data is processed on the edge before being stored in the cloud. The two main benefits of edge processing are issuing electricity hazard warnings immediately and preserving user privacy. In addition to being a scalable solution that intended for use in individual households, commercial offices and city power grids, Synergy is open-source so that it can be implemented more widely. This paper contains a system overview as well as initial finding based on the data collected by Synergy before assessing the impact the system can have on society

Energy Efficiency in the ICT - Profiling Power Consumption in Desktop Computer Systems

Energy awareness in the ICT has become an important issue. Focusing on software, recent work suggested the existence of a relationship between power consumption, software configuration and usage patterns in computer systems. The aim of this work was collecting and analysing power consumption data of general-purpose computer systems, simulating common usage scenarios, in order to extract a power consumption profile for each scenario. We selected two desktop systems of different generations as test machines. Meanwhile, we developed 11 usage scenarios, and conducted several test runs of them, collecting power consumption data by means of a power meter. Our analysis resulted in an estimation of a power consumption value for each scenario and software application used, obtaining that each single scenario introduced an overhead from 2 to 11 Watts, which corresponds to a percentage increase that can reach up to 20% on recent and more powerful systems. We determined that software and its usage patterns impact consistently on the power consumption of computer systems. Further work will be devoted to evaluate how power consumption is affected by the usage of specific system resource

Performance impacts of mobile carbon footprint calculators in South Africa

Modernization and advancement in technology have contributed towards the increased use of mobile phones in South Africa. The increased demand for services and energy has resulted in the increase in generation of electricity to meet the country's need. Consequently, South Africa now possesses the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emission per capita relative to other developing countries. Conservation organizations in South Africa argue that the first step towards reducing carbon footprint is through its measurement. In spite of the high penetration of mobile phones and the alarming GHG emission, there is hardly any research to investigate the fit and performance impacts of mobile carbon footprint calculators in South Africa. In fulfilment of this gap, the rationale of this study was to (1) investigate factors that are suitable to determine the fit of mobile technology for carbon footprint tasks, (2) adopt an existing model from the vast base of theories and models on technology usage and impact, (3) test the research model based on a South African sample within a mobile technology and carbon footprint context in order to determine the performance impacts on individual carbon footprint tasks. Sample data were collected, through a survey instrument, and was analysed quantitatively. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis was used to evaluate the study's outer and the inner model. The study revealed that only task-technology fit was the cause of performance impacts on individual carbon footprint tasks. In addition, there was no significant difference in the estimation and offsetting of carbon footprint between the users and non-users of mobile technology. In conclusion, this study established that performance impacts on individual carbon footprint tasks are only determined by the fit of the mobile technology. The insignificant difference between users and non users of carbon calculators, in performance impacts on carbon footprint tasks, was an unexpected result but yet relevant to practitioners. Further implications to practice and theory are outlined in conclusion to this study