Now, in all my rantings about why Macs are better than PCs, I’ve never thought to do research into something as mundane as electricity bills – but the University of Liege in Belgium has, and discovered an incredible fact:
According to Motorola, the PowerPC G4 chip used in Macs has a nominal power consumption of 21W.
On Intel’s own figures, a Pentium IV processor has a nominal power consumption of 80W.
In Belgium, Beaujeant continues, 1kWh is 0.17 euros (without taxes). The taxes are 21% in Belgium. In the course of a year, the university’s computers are running at least 220 days, eight hours per day. We have 1,000 Macintosh and 4,000 Wintel computers on the campus, Beaujeant says.
If we replaced all the Wintels with Macs, we economise as follows:
(4000 * 0.08 * 8 * 220 * 0.17 * 1.21) – (4000 * 0.021 * 8 * 220 * 0.17 * 1.21) = 85,440 euros/year (or approx. US$78,604 savings in a year).
Holy crap! My desktop Mac runs 24/7 (to serve my internet radio stations), albeit with the monitor and hard drives shut down most of the time. I wonder what the actual electricity cost is for it?
