BLOG on IT/IS in Healthcare & Life Sciences Joerg Schwarz on Healthcare [Health + Care]

Don't get me wrong - when I pump gas, I am as shocked as anyone else having to pay $4.15 for a gallon of unleaded. But I also have begun to consider a good side of these high gas prices: America finally seems to consider energy as an issue.

One gallon is 3.7854118 liters. That means we now pay 1.0963 USD per Liter. Given a conversion rate of 0.6466 Euro to a dollar, we are paying the equivalent of 0.7089 Euro cents per liter. Still a bargain compared to what people in Europe already have to pay! The price for one liter of gas in my German home town of Bergheim was 1.509 Euro cents today - that is  2.13 times more expensive than what I would have had to pay in Morgan Hill this morning (I didn't, because I use Caltrain instead). So - in Europe gas prices are already more than double compared to the U.S. As much as it was unconceiveable just a few years ago that we would ever have to pay more than $2, it becomes now plausible we'll have to pay as much as $8 per gallon in the not so distant future. Better get prepared! But still, there is something good about this trend. Really! 

European governments decided after the oil crisis in the 70'ies to add substantial taxes to the prices of gas to make it "artificially" more expensive. As a result, there has been substantial investment into renewable forms of energy, and in smaller, more fuel efficient cars. While we in the U.S. still splurged gas with gas guzzlers like the HUMMER or other SUVs, Europeans already drove mostly fuel efficient cars.

Another example of energy prices driving ecological behavior is solar energy. Germany is the leader in the use of photovoltaic panels for the generation of power, with an installed capacity of over 4,000 Mega Watts (MW). All of the European Union, an economy the size of the U.S., had about 5,400 MW installed in 2007, while the U.S. was trailing with merely 844 MW installed, roughly one sixth. I would assume this correlates to energy prices more than to sun shine hours, as we have more sun shine here in California. But when electricity is cheap, return on investment is an issue, even with government subsidies in place. But this is changing now, too. When I told my mom this Sunday that I had just signed a contract for solar panels, her comment was "that's about time". Since electricity prices have risen and will rise quite substantially in California, it has now become economically interesting to install photovoltaic cells. The representative from SolarCity, a silicon valley startup installing japanese made Kyocera PV panels, told me they are of late busy like crazy. Everyone wants PV on their roof now. No wonder - check out the ROI SolarCity calculated for me:

 Okay, so what has this to do with Sun and Sun in health care?

Well, a while back, many people would not have (and actually did not) pay attention to the fact that our thin client Sun Ray actually consume less than 8 Watt of Energy per hour in operation (not idle). That means my little solar panel installation of 2.5 kw/h could power 200 Sun Rays during the day, including the required servers. 200 display clients - enough for an average size community hospital!

In order to do that, we would only need two SPARC CMT servers, as in the case of Denver Health, where one T2000 virtualizes over 100 desktops, as you can read here. A T2000 consumes about 275 Watt. Divided by 100, that would be about 3 Watt per client. Two servers together would equal 550 Watt plus 1.6 kw for the SunRays, which  equals a total of roughly 2.2 kw AC - the solar panels will produce 2.5 kw DC, so we should be fine. No wonder you get a PG&E rebate for our CMT servers. 

Lets  see how the Sun Rays compare to a PC. Dell is friendly enough to publish detailled power consumption data. An average Optiplex 320 energy star rated desktop with 512 MB of memory consumes between a maximum of 125 Watt and 80 Watt idle (!!!). If we assume the PC is used to deliver a clinical application, it might be idle 70% of the time and fully utilized 30% of the time: 80*.7+125*.3= 93.5.  That means a PC will consume 11.7 times as much energy as a Sun Ray ultra thin client. That makes a Hummer actually look not so bad, after all. Assuming 15 miles per gallon (mpg) for a Hummer H2 versus 45 mpg for a Toyota Prius hybrid, the Hummer consumes only 3 times as much as a Prius. Let me visualize this:

	use as much gas as
	use as much electricity as

So - why are high gases prices good? Well, the Hummer and SUV boom seems to be over, considering >$4 per gallon. That is a good thing. We call fossil energy "fossil" because it is millions of years old and we can't make more of it in our life times. We also know that we either peaked or are close to peaking in oil production. In light of that, its good to conserve and use more fuel efficient cars or trucks until we figure out how to make fuel from pond scum. And higher gas prices are a good incentive for conservation.

Likewise,  higher energy prices and electricity costs are not only an incetive to put solar panels on your roofs, they should also be an incentive to consider how we deliver access to clinical information to care givers.  Imagine how big a roof you'd need to produce enough solar power for 200 Dell Optiplex desktops.