PowerNet

Data from the Department of Energy suggests that computing equipment in office and education buildings accounts for about 1.5% of all electricity consumption in the United States. Unfortunately, it is difficult to understand exactly how this energy is distributed among different devices and user tasks.

The PowerNet project aims to characterize the energy consumption of enterprise-style computing infrastructures. This includes user machines, as well as networking and storage equipment. Fine-grained power consumption data correlated with device utilization can highlight opportunities for reducing the energy costs of everyday computing.

Currently, a hybrid network of power meters is monitoring 145 devices, consuming 11,888 watthours.

This amount accounts for 2.6% of the total power conssumption of the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford.

Total power consumption for the last 6 hours