Mountain View, California-based startup CherryPal announced that it is now shipping a fully green desktop PC (the C114) as of December 2nd, just in time for it to be a perfect green Christmas present.  Although it is a desktop, it is about the size of a paperback book - perfect for space limited computer users.  It consumes only 2 Watts of power (the company’s website tells us this is about the same as a clock radio), and uses cloud computing, so there is no need to run the constant virus and spyware checkers that consumes another valuable resource, time.  As it uses 80% fewer parts than most PCs, it generates less waste in the manufacturing process. As electronics manufacturing uses many toxic and hard to eliminate chemicals, it showed great foresight on the part of the founder of CherryPal (and ingenuity) in designing it this way.

The C114 also has no moving parts, meaning it should last about 10 years.  This is significant, as computer junk has become a large contributor to the size of our landfills, despite the newly emerging electronics recycling efforts I see throughout Silicon Valley.   

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Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.

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