Linuxers takes a look at Powertop, a tool that monitor the power consumption of your Linux system running on Intel platforms

We all are excited about saving energy and serving the environment but we don't realize that we can start from the things right beside us, for example, the computer. There are a lot of things going on in a computer which keeps consuming power. Based upon the load, the consumption could be high or low, but even when you think that your computer is doing nothing, there could be a hundred of things going on(some could be useless) that consume/waste energy. This specially sucks when your laptop is on battery power. PowerTop, a project to save power on Intel platforms running Linux, lets you know the state of your system w.r.t. power consumption, a sorted list of the most contributing culprits(apps/interrupts) and some suggestions to make your system more eco-friendly.
Not just for increasing battery life, powertop can help you figure out bugs or flaws in the system and fixing them can help you save a lot of energy and in case of large data centers with thousands of machines, it could directly result in significant reduction in costs of electricity and chip heating issues.

Powertop - Monitor the power consumption of your Linux system running on Intel platforms