TopTen USA, which issues quarterly rankings for computer energy efficiency, finds the most energy efficient laptop is the Lenovo ThinkPad T430s, using 7.4 kWh of electricity in a year of typical use.
The average comparable model uses 28 kWh per year – more than 3 times the energy. On average, TopTen-listed laptops use about 48 percent of the energy of comparable models.
The TopTen’s laptop rankings are:
- Lenovo ?ThinkPad T430s
- Apple Macbook Air MD231, MD223/224
- Apple Macbook Pro MD212, MD213
- Acer Aspire S7-191, 391
- Lenovo IdeaPad S300
- Apple Macbook Pro MC975, MC976
- Acer Aspire V5-571
- Samsung 300 Series
- MSI GX60
- Dell Precision M6700
Computers using minimal amounts of power can do everything their inefficient competition can do, according to TopTen USA. The company says a regular, rapid improvement in computing power has been observed since 1965, when Intel founder Gordon Moore offered the analysis now known as “Moore’s Law,” tracking the rapidly increasing number of transistors that can fit on a chip. But it wasn’t until a year or so ago that the correlating reduction in energy consumption was quantified by Stanford University’s Jonathan Koomey and a group of colleagues. They recognized that the number of computations a computer can make using a given amount of electricity has doubled every 1.6 years since the 1940s.
TopTen USA? is a nonprofit founded in 2009, dedicated to speeding the adoption of high-efficiency consumer products. Organized with the support of utilities, regional and national energy efficiency alliances, and national environmental groups, TopTen’s experts identify the ten most efficient models in each of the most energy intensive consumer product categories.
Another group that ranks energy efficiency of consumer products is the Super-efficient Equipment and Appliance Deployment (SEAD), an initiative of the Clean Energy Ministerial, a high-level global forum launched by the Department of Energy and other leading governments in July 2010 to advance clean energy technology.