Good. It's time Silicon Valley cared about TDP the way auto makers have to care about gas mileage. Tighten the screws.
This Dell PC probably has as much to do with Silicon Valley as Tesla has with Detroit.
PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
141–150 of 281 posts
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#142Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> about a quarter of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power That cannot possibly be true. I would love to know how they calculated that. In New Zealand only about 20% of home electricity is used on electronics. And in the USA it appears to be even lower. https://www.nzcompare.com/n/power/average-household-electric... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/what-uses-the-most-energy-h... Dryers,…
I suspect it’s not quite right either, but two of those appliances (dryer, heating) are often powered by natural gas in the US (and on the East Coast, heating is done with “heating oil”).
Heating oil is generally used more in older installations. Where natural gas is available, we're using that instead now.
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. According to Natural Resources Defense Council via NYT, "about a quarter of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power mode" in Northern California [1]. Huge opportunity for efficiency improvement through regulatory action, given idle power consumption is otherwise an afterthought for both manufacturers and consumers. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/science/just-how-much-pow...
> about a quarter of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power That cannot possibly be true. I would love to know how they calculated that. In New Zealand only about 20% of home electricity is used on electronics. And in the USA it appears to be even lower. https://www.nzcompare.com/n/power/average-household-electric... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/what-uses-the-most-energy-h... Dryers,…
It's not true, at least not in the sense that's implied. If you read the study you'll see they defined "idle load" not as electronics but as all devices which operate passively.
They did ten case studies, and in one they found the highest idle load device was a water recirculation pump and the second was a halogen light being left on 24/7 because no one cared.
If they studied my home they would consider my fish tanks as "idle load," because they are designed to run continuously.
This is not a study of devices in sleep mode. This is a study primarily measuring devices left on, or devices designed to always be on.
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more. Half the issues you've listed are most certainly due to incompetence/mismanagement rather than PCs in CA/CO/HI/OR/VT using slightly more power. eg. wildfires: Gov. Gavin Newsom cut the fire prevention budget b…
Not going to get into the laptop discussion but the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought, and those are much worse recently because of global warning. PG&E could bury ever cable, they could increase the fire prevention budget by 10 times over, and it wouldn't fix it.
>the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought
Well duh, but since we're talking about climate change we should be comparing against a counterfactual where climate change hasn't happened. I'm sure heat/drought existed prior to global warming. Did wild fires not exist back then? Should Newsom be let off the hook for his budget cuts because the forest was going to catch fire anyways due to global warming?
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#146Just want to remind everyone how far California has gone in energy efficiency: > In 2018, California's energy consumption was second-highest among the states, but its per capita energy consumption was the fourth-lowest due in part to its mild climate and its energy efficiency programs. Source: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4 This is an achievement to be proud of.
High energy prices have probably done a lot to incentivize lower consumption & efficiency. But mild climate does still give it an unfair advantage if trying to compare it apples to apples with other states. South eastern states are always going to eat a huge chunk of Watt Hours in air conditioning, and in some states many people have little choice but to use electric heat or furnaces. I'd be very interested in state-…
It might not be that California has an unfair advantage, but that southern states have an unfair disadvantage.
If southern states spike their watt hours due to aircon, we could say the cause is poor construction/architecture. The poorer the insulation (southern homes' insulation is crap compared to northern) the more you need to pump the aircon. And when homes are not designed for optimal environmental efficiency or passive temp regulation, you can't cool the home well except with more aircon.
(All this also assumes that aircon is some sort of human right. We could learn how to deal with heat without power, the way we had to for the past 300,000 years)
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#147Good. It's time Silicon Valley cared about TDP the way auto makers have to care about gas mileage. Tighten the screws.
Automakers shouldn't be caring about gas mileage. YOU should. If you want to drive a 50 MPG Prius, do it. If you want to drive a 12 MPG PowerStroke Diesel V-10 Ford F-350, do it.
> Automakers shouldn't be caring about gas mileage.
YOU should.
I'm not an expert in cars, automakers are. They can do a better job.
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#148These 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-ef…
I'm becoming increasingly extreme on actions were should take to fight climate change, but have to agree with you here. This type of weirdness happens because of super specific regulation instead of creating the right incentive structure. Just charge for negative externalities, in this case carbon emissions. That will incentivice consumers to seek out low-power consumption devices and energy providers to offer competitive pricing by avoiding carbon emissions. Set the right incentives and then the market/everyone together will solve the problem
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. According to Natural Resources Defense Council via NYT, "about a quarter of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power mode" in Northern California [1]. Huge opportunity for efficiency improvement through regulatory action, given idle power consumption is otherwise an afterthought for both manufacturers and consumers. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/science/just-how-much-pow...
> about a quarter of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power That cannot possibly be true. I would love to know how they calculated that. In New Zealand only about 20% of home electricity is used on electronics. And in the USA it appears to be even lower. https://www.nzcompare.com/n/power/average-household-electric... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/what-uses-the-most-energy-h... Dryers,…
This is the source NYT cited [0]. From page 11:
> Per research and analysis conducted by the Stanford Sustainable Systems Labs, idle load was 218 watts on average across the 70,000 homes in PG&E’s service territory. We estimated the always-on share of this idle load to be 164 watts.
Then they go on to say:
> ALWAYS-ON, 23% Continuous loads
> ACTIVE, 77% Variable loads, including heating and cooling, lighting, and actively used appliances
So their definition of idle load includes things like heating/cooling, wtf? Then they guesstimate that 23% of that is always-on load (continuous load) where do they get than number from?
[0] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/home-idle-load-IP.p...
Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
#150All that the rules say (yes, I read them) is that a workstation with 32G RAM (formula is 10 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB) must not exceed ~ 11W in sleep mode and a desktop with 32G RAM must not exceed 6W in sleep mode (5 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB). Basically, these desktops probably have very ancient/buggy motherboards with broken ACPI. Good riddance. Fun fact: Desktops/workstations shipped without an operating system at purchasers reque…
>All that the rules say (yes, I read them) is that a workstation with 32G RAM (formula is 10 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB) must not exceed ~ 11W in sleep mode and a desktop with 32G RAM must not exceed 6W in sleep mode (5 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB).
That's it? The rules only mandate maximum power consumption for sleep mode? Some comments linked to the actual regulations[1], and they seem to contain tables with per-year maximums per device[2]. Can you comment on this?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955212
[2] https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Link/Document/Blob/Icabb0f7...
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