These overzealous "green" regulations crack me up. Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro-green-energy: I think my own country should stop building coal power plants and start investing heavily in solar and wind. However, a lot of these consumer-targetted rules are just ludicrous bureaucratic overreach that cause more issues than they solve.
A quick example: My apartment block was just "upgraded" to meet some new energy-efficiency building codes, and the result is that the car park now looks like a cave. The new LED lights turn on and off automatically, but they turn on seconds after you drive past them. So you're basically driving along in the darkness, but followed in the distance by some lights. It's a lot like the glowing trails of bioluminescence you see behind dolphins sometimes. It's insane.
A more IT-focused example relevant to this article: I have made a name for myself running around to various customers doubling the performance of their core business applications by turning off dynamic power management on their database servers. There's a literal turbo button (in software) on every piece of server kit sold for about 15 years now because of some stupid regulation that was started by some hippie moron in California.
Think about how absolutely crazy it is that to be "energy efficient", companies all around the world are buying servers twice as powerful as they actually need, just to save $50 in electricity per annum. The amount of time, money, and resources wasted waiting around for CPUs running at 50% of their rated clock speed is just mindboggling.
This extra computer power they've been forced to buy isn't energy neutral! More chips have to be made, more assembly is required, etc... It burns up an unbelievable amount of resources in order to save a negligible amount of electricity, which is now becoming increasingly clean anyway...
I'm not making this up. A large telco here kept doubling down on the scale of their new LOB application server platform because the performance was bad. The irony is that the more hardware you throw at something like this, the slower it gets because the percentage load drops, which lets the power management kick in more often and more aggressively. Last I hard, they were planning on buying another 100 blade servers, despite 5% or lower loads on what they already had.
PS: Some cloud platforms like Azure leave this on the default settings at the hypervisor host level, so now there is nothing I can do to improve this situation. The control has been taken away from me, so I guess everyone just has to learn to live with 3 GHz CPUs running at 1.5 GHz forever...