Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

dell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 281 posts

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#161

Post by ashtonkem »

c3534l wrote: post #97
oofbey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? 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.

You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. If battery usage is a problem because of climate change, then tax carbon and you can decide to cut back or pay more on dish washing, food deliveries, big houses with huge heating cost and the like, and everyone who wants a cool laptop can spend their money (or carbon credits) on that. If that's what's bothersome, the…

It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does.

As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thing to be avoided as much as possible. Dishwashers reuse a small amount of hot water repeatedly in an insulated box until it’s fully spent (from a cleaning perspective). Hand washing sends a continuous stream of hot, soapy water down the drain, wasting both water, soap, and the energy required to bring that water up to temperature.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#162

Post by WalterBright »

npunt wrote: post #70
kccqzy wrote: post #36

Just 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.

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...

It's annoying that devices don't have physical power switches anymore. I usually use a bus strip with a switch on it.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#163

Post by nostromo »

ghouse wrote: post #103
ww520 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do the electric bills keep increasing?

In part, because the fixed infrastructure is built to serve peak demand, not average consumption. Bring down the peak (flatten the curve) and the rates will come down too. Or, put differently, rates are high exactly because California per-capita usage is low -- fewer kWh across which to amortize costs. Importantly, while California rates are relatively high, customer's bills are not -- because the customers use less…

You put such a positive spin on spending more for less. You’re welcome, Californians, we’re doing you a favor!

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#164

Post by JoshTriplett »

bradlys wrote: post #27
JoshTriplett wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes a lot more sense to ban a car (regardless of price) for polluting the environment we all breathe and contributing to global warming, than it does to ban a computer that uses power the end user pays for by the kilowatt.

> It makes a lot more sense to ban a car (regardless of price) for polluting the environment we all breathe and contributing to global warming, than it does to ban a computer that uses power the end user pays for by the kilowatt. What? That makes no sense. Unless you're off the grid and using solar - where do you think the electricity from your outlets comes from? People still pay for the car and the gas - just like…

> where do you think the electricity from your outlets comes from

Power generation sources that can and should be made cleaner. And those sources can be made cleaner regardless of how much individuals use (and pay for).

> People still pay for the car and the gas - just like you do for the electricity that is result of work that pumps shit into the air too.

An individual's selection of vehicle directly affects carbon emissions in a way that can't be mitigated in a society-wide fashion. Electrical power generation, on the other hand, can get cleaner without the end user changing anything. So it makes more sense to have regulations about the carbon emissions on a car. A laptop doesn't have carbon emissions directly, it just uses electricity, so at a societal level that seems better managed by improving electricity generation.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#165

Post by 627ruffu »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #93
kccqzy wrote: post #36

Just 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.

> This is an achievement to be proud of. I mean I'm all for reducing power consumption, but is having a mild climate an achievement to be proud of? I'd guess that California's main population centers have fewer degree days away from 72 F than any other state in the country. By default, you'd expect their power consumption to be the very lowest. (The other states close to CA in consumption per capita have much worse c…

Lots of athletes are proud of their rankings despite generally having genetic advantages. Fourth from the bottom per-capita is fourth from the bottom per-capita regardless of how you achieve it.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#166

Post by dredmorbius »

kccqzy wrote: post #36

Just 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.

I'd really like to see that trended over time.

California's energy mix tends to be low due to a lack of both a heavy heating (northern climates) and cooling (southern / south-eastern) load. Housing stock has been notoriously inefficient in insulation, though newer construction gains on that.

Major usage has been in transportation. Sprawl'll do that to ya.

LLNL has historical energy usage charts, and began breaking that out by state sometime since the 1990s (possibly only in the 2000s / 2010s). History since 2010 is readily available here there's also an archive though you've got to hunt for it:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy

US EIA have 2019 data, but no trend-over-time. The map clearly shows that high per-capita energy usage is concentrated in states with either weather extremes, a large rural population, or both:

https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/#/series/12

Intersting, New York is directly after California in per-capita usage. Rhode Island just edges out both.

A 2013 NRDC report shows that CA's per-capita usage has been flat since roughly 1980, whilst the rest of the US has increased. I suspect much of that growth is due to population increases in the South, with growing cooling load.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130714131300/http://www.nrdc.o...

Charts here: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/California-Is-P...

There may well be a case to be made that California's accomplished significant progress in energy efficiency. But I've a strong suspicion that what we're looking at instead is credit-claiming where not particularly due, based on dominant other factors. That's unfortunately rather common in this space, in both senses of the word.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#167

Post by chrisco255 »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #146
ineedasername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our ancestors didn't really need air conditioning in the ice age.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#168

Post by paxswill »

Pxtl wrote: post #60

Honestly, now that SSDs are near universal why are we bothering with sleep mode anymore anyways? Can't full hibernate be made fast enough for no-power standby?

Hibernation with kernel lockdown on Linux doesn’t work yet. Background post from a few months back: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55845.html

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#169

Post by abz10 »

techrat wrote: post #121
abz10 wrote: post #110

Years ago I bought a tiny hockey puck sized computer to act as an internal web server. AFAIK there seemed to be no way for me to prevent it from going to sleep, I presume it was due to a similar regulation. This one from the EU. Had to throw the thing out. I’m not looking forward to having to fight hardware / software locks on my computer that make it go to sleep all the time.

Sounds like a user misconfiguration issue to me. I've never had an issue keeping a device from going to sleep when it's... actively doing something... like running services.

It occurred in both Windows and Ubuntu. In Windows “Never” wasn’t an option for Sleep (edit; I forget if it wasn’t an option or selecting it didn’t work), in Ubuntu the usual disable sleep commands didn’t work. Someone in the Ubuntu forums suggested there was a recent power management change due to EU reg and the code around it was freshly buggy. I spent a day on it before cutting my losses.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#170

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

navjack27 wrote: post #72
Pxtl wrote: post #60

Honestly, now that SSDs are near universal why are we bothering with sleep mode anymore anyways? Can't full hibernate be made fast enough for no-power standby?

Exactly! Sleep mode is known to have issues. On off over the years multiple different operating systems have had issues with sleep modes. Hibernate just always works and it's quick.

I didn’t know of such issues. What are they?
Post reply on HN