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When will these things become dimmable?

probably never

In the US we have a program designed for that purpose. http://www.energystar.gov/

It seems unfortunate that The Tech Report is the one that has to step up and measure energy efficiency. OK, so AMD is more efficient at idle and Xeon is more efficient at 100%. Who ever really runs at either of those levels? What about 10%, 20%, 30%, etc. Those are real-life utilization rates. SPEC is looking into doing something. So is the EPA. Maybe they can get together and figure it out.

Minimum cost occurs at about 80 feet, with windspeeds of 12.26 mph, producing an average 162.8 kWh/month worth $11.40. The tower at that height costs $2000. Payback time, ignoring interest, is 27.79 years. That's not economical.

A couple of things were left out. One is inflation, excepting maintainance, all of the costs are upfront and once paid for it doesn't need to be paid for again. Power from the grid though always raises. Say you pay $.10 pe kwh now, in ten years you may be paying $1. Okay ten tyme as much may be radical but the point is that if you gemerate your own electricity your energy was paid in the beginning and you don't pay more later but if you get your power from the grid you'll always be paying even when prices rise. The second think overlooked are rebates or tax credits. Governments, both federal and many states offer tax credits. DSIRE lists what is offered in each state in the US.

The biggest thing a person that's thinking of generating the power they use can do though is replacing the things that use power with energy effiecent replacements. Those 75 watt bulbs replace them with 15 watt cfls, compact florescent lights. The old washing machine and dryer or frig, replace them with a new one that has a good Energy Star rating. The idea being you want negawatts, energy conserved and not produced, rather than "new" methods to produce more megawatts of energy.

You're interested in installing a wind genie? Have you checked into Home Power magazine ? Also, though "Solar" is in the name, Solar Today also has some articles on wind genies.

As another poster mentioned, it is possible, just a bit of a pain.

Or, here's an easy way: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr _pm_ez_gpo

1. Please do an estimate on what your annual power production will be. Find a map like this Illinois map from this link and figure out if your $8-$11k is better spent elsewhere for energy conservation. I know if you're not living in one of those two little pink splotches in Illinois, odds are your wind turbine will never pay for itself, whereas insulting your air vents will pay for itself within a year or two at most.
2. Trees will kill your wind generation capability. I believe the rule of thumb is your turbine needs to be X distance away from the nearest tree. X is some sort of multiple (3x, 4x) times the height of the nearest tree. If your house is shaded by 50 foot deciduous trees like mine is, you have no chance. Put up solar panels, and only if those said trees don't block those, either. (Trees are good, by the way; they reduce your cooling costs in the summer, and in the winter when the leaves fall off, the sun can heat your house).

The Refrigerator Retirement Savings Calculator answers just that question. That old refrigerator some people keep for extra space can be pretty expensive.

The ENERGY STAR specification for computers is currently under revision. EPA is considering new performance requirements for laptops, workstations, desktop computers, integrated computers, and desktop-derived servers under the new specification. Note: desktop-derived servers currently cannot qualify as ENERGY STAR under Version 3.0 of the specification; however, EPA is considering allowing these products to qualify under the new specification.

If you live under the domain of a more enlightened electric utility company (or, if you prefer, a more regulated utility), there may be subsidized bulbs or rebates available for your CFL lamp and fixture needs. http://www.efi.org/ offers limited quantities at subsidized prices, primarily in the New England area. Even if you're not covered by the subsidy, EFI offers retail pricing and honors manufacturers' warrantees -- if your 10,000 hour CFL goes out a few years too soon, it will be replaced with minimal hassle.

Brand can be king and you get what you pay for. If you've had a bad experience with a particular brand but like the concept of CFLs, try another. There are some really shitty CFL manufacturers, to be sure. If you don't like the light it gives off, try a different color temperature (higher is whiter/"bluer", 2700k is "standard," about as close as they get to an incandescent temp) and wattage.

Mercury content is fairly negligible and is offset by reduction in coal-burning plant pollution. They can be recycled with many local recycling programs. Magnetic ballasts in CFL fixtures have been replaced by more efficient electronic ballasts that cut down on intereference, hum, and slow start times.

In addition to CFL subsidies, rebates are offered on Energy Star appliances. Check http://www.energystar.gov/ if you're in the market and take the time to do the math in terms of overall price and energy payback.

Call your utilities and see what else they might have to offer. There are low-interest loan programs out there for more efficient heating/cooling equipment. Replace your windows. Get an energy audit. Take advantage of federal tax credits. Learn how to regulate solar heat gain. There are any number of ways to cut costs and bring energy demand down regardless, if CFLs aren't your bag.

Full disclosure: I work on both of those projects.

Full disclosure: I work on both of those projects.

I looked at that web page. They don't give their capacity units, but I'm gonna have to assume it is in liters.

That means the freezer on that vestfrost site uses 51.13904511 KWH/cu ft/year.

Now, at the energy star site http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=ref rig.display_products_html, the freezer at the top of the list uses 45.46666667 KWH/cu ft/year, which is 10% less.

I'm sure there's some fudging I'm missing in these numbers, but I don't see how those devices you list are super-efficient. Efficient, yes. Super-efficient, I just don't see it.

Luxeon LED lighting is fine, but white LEDs (these included) aren't as efficient as fluorescent lighting.

Hey! That's a really good idea!

What a great idea! I wonder why nobody's ever thought of doing that?!

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. Not only do they save you energy/money, they're still pretty geeky! I've been replacing my traditional bulbs as they wear out, and these have much longer lifespans (which more than makes up for initial cost). The only thing I noticed when I first got them was a slight delay turning on, but I've gotten so used to that I no longer even notice.

The power rating of the PSU is how much power it *can deliver*, not how much it will drain from the grid just because you plug it in.

True, but power supplies aren't always very efficient. Quoting this web page:

While the best power supplies are more than 90% efficient, some are only 20 to 40% efficient, wasting the majority of the electricity that passes through them. As a result, today's power supplies consume at least 2% of all U.S. electricity production. More efficient power supply designs could cut that usage in half, saving nearly $3 billion and about 24 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

There's a bit more information at wikipedia, but I don't see any hard numbers.

Here's some more info from the energystar website:

EPA's research has indicated that approximately one-third of the electricity that flows through power supplies is consumed in the power supply itself. On average, these power supplies are only about 50 to 70% efficient, wasting 30 to 50% of the electricity flowing through them. Overall, 2 to 3% of US electricity could be saved through the use of more efficient power supplies.

-jim

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the DOE has free software (for Windows, sigh) that helps organizations control/set monitor power management.

Our small company (when money was tight) shut down lots of extraneous unused servers and got serious about turning monitors off at night, and saved a fair bunch. (We had tons of servers lying around.)

Like it said, on par.

You are whining about blowing circuits with your computer? I have to turn off everything in my house every time I plug in my welder to a dedicated 220 in the garage. If I don't i blow the main for the house every time. If I turn the welder up I can draw 220v at 70 amps. It doesn't help that its an 80 year old house.
But on a more realistic note, I would hate to have you peoples power bills. Has it occurred to you that maybe you should think about using a little less power? Out here in CA we have had rolling blackouts because of idiots who can't turn off the 45 appliances in their house they aren't using, and still have a 30 year old electric hot water heater. Maybe you should go check out Energystar.gov

Yes, Virginia, phosphors do wear out over time. The problem used to be much, much worse.

I hate screensavers that run more than ten minutes -- they rarely seem clever any more, and more importantly they seduce a lot of people into thinking they are somehow saving energy. In fact, if the tube is fired up the box is consuming nearly full power and releasing nearly full heat.

MUCH better is any kind of sleep mode, which might reduce a 75-watt load to 5 watts. Or ... turn the darn monitor off for a power consumption of maybe 2 watts (off doesn't quite mean off). A friend and I went to ridiculous lengths during the California energy crisis to persuade his tech company IT dept. to tell everyone to turn off their 3,000 machines when not in use, or at least overnight, or AT LEAST over the weekends and holidays.

They told workers to leave them on because of the old tale that electronics last longer that way. More research, I eventually reached a very friendly engineer with the Sony monitors operations. In short, the leave-'em-on philosophy made some sense before all solid-state surface-mount design prevailed because of thermal shock and "creep," which made IC's rise in their sockets. Now everything is soldered and the components are many times more reliable. In terms of monitor wear, it's probably a toss-up. No one would seriously leave their TV on 24 hours a day to save money, right? And even if wear were accelerated somehow with the machines on 1/3 as long, the amount of energy consumed would have bought a ton of hardware.

We calculated the excess electrical in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's before factoring in the added load of the air conditioning to remove the waste heat (most of the energy used goes to waste heat). (A rough guess: the best estimate I could find suggested it takes 1 watt of A/C consumption to remove 3-4 watts of heat.) There was also a citizenship issue to energy conservation at the time, as there were rolling blackouts to ration energy the closer the system came to overload. (You all remember the stories.)

Um, anyway, I hope I made a point. Er, my point. One thing Apple did right was to support Energy Star early on. "By design," MS Windows NT 4.0, which his company uses, does not support power mgmt even though the newer monitors typically do. Yes ... they could upgrade the O/S ... but what they have works. There are cheap utilities that persuade NT to play along, but that would require getting the IT people to install it, and if they were unwilling to listen about turning monitors off, well.... you get it.

I think they did start telling employees to turn the monitors off just recently, maybe 18 months after our email campaign and a half-million in electricity. Could the computers be next? They're just dumb workstations and don't do anything in the off hours.

Last nail in the coffin: To give you a sense of his IT department, they sent a tech down once who could not be made to understand, by several engineers, the difference between a SCSI and a parallel port ("Well, it should fit."). No shit. :)