Good point, advice comes from discussion and experience. If for example someone is encouraged to update their system to a Sandy-Bridge based computer, while they may have to fork out a bit, if they sell their old system over time the difference in running costs would outweigh their initial expense. At the same time they would be contributing more to the science.

If nobody bothered to post this information in the forums, hundreds or thousands of people would not be motivated to buy more energy efficient systems that do more work.

riverarl, by contributing to the science you are helping to develope clean energy materials that will hopefully improve the situation presented .

We don't ask or expect anyone to keep their computers running more than they would otherwise normally run them. Furthermore, World Community Grid defaults the CPU usage to considerably less than 100% to keep the computer from significantly increasing energy consumption (this setting can be further adjusted by the member). We have measured that for at least some laptop computers, this amounts to only 3 watts extra power on top of about 50 watts of power consumed if the computer is idle. That 3 extra watts, if running continuously for a year, amounts to less than one US dollar of electricity for the year. The green idea here is that instead of wasting 50 watts having the computer on, a few extra watts makes all of that energy put to good use helping humanity and the world. Few charitable projects cost so little to generate such good benefits. If some people want to donate more by leaving their computers on longer or setting the contribution to a higher CPU utilization, that is their choice as with any donation. And we do appreciate and thank all members for their contributions to the projects we run here.

Here's another way to look at it. People buy generators 'just in case' the power goes out. How much does that generator cost them? I bet they never recover the cost of it for the electricity it produces when you take into consideration fuel and all that. BUT....

Lets throw a hurricane at you, your power is out for a week. How much is having electricity worth to you now? Hot showers, being able to cook your food, sterilize water? How about the 500 dollars of meat in your freezer which is NOT spoiled because you have electricity?

You paid a bit up front in hopes of a big return in the long run. Everything costs money, R and D is not cheap for anything.

What if a breakthrough was made that could save us 100 megawatts a year. What if we used 4 megawatts of 'extra' power to make this discovery? Is it worth it now? What if instead of making this break through in 2 years it took 8 because nobody wanted to run their computers above idle? How much energy did we waste now, because we didn't want to use a little up front?

What if drug companies decided not to do all the research for new medicines because they didn't want to waste the extra electricity? What medicines and cures would we be without now?

Walking out of a room with the lights burning all day and nobody in there is a waste of electricity. Using the power to help science and more importantly humanity, is not a waste. My opinion here.

In my case running it actually helps. I have lizards, bearded dragons actually. (well others too but back to the point) Their heating lamps and pads was running me a good 30 to 60 a month in electricity. Their cage is on a stand thing sort of, with room underneath. I put my computers under there and enclose it on 3 sides with plastic. The haat from the computers rise, through the glass bottom, into the sand in the bottom of the cage and they have a belly warmer now and I do not have to run the hot pads / heat lamps. The extra maybe 3 dollars a month I spend keeping my computers revved up on projects is saving me 30 or more in heating costs for the critters.

However to play devils advocate, a high end rig, with a high end vid card, from zero load to full load on a multi core cpu and the vid, yes you can burn 300 extra watts easy. WCG is not bad at all with just CPU processing but when you start running a GPU at full bore, like with the milky way project, the watts can fly.

Just my 2 cents.

Aaron

This project narrows down materials that could be used in solar panel design. It's a long way from a replacement fossil fuel power plant.