Slashdot Mirror
The True Cost of Standby Power
Luther19 writes, "How much do all of our computers and electronic devices sitting in standby mode cost us? The author of the article concludes that he could save $24.44 per year by switching out wasteful power supplies. The article also touches on a global initiative to cut down on standby power, called '1-Watt': 'The idea has been promoted by the IEA, which first developed an international 1-Watt plan back in 1999. Countries like Australia and Korea have signed on officially, while countries like the US require 1-Watt in government procurement, which will have ripple effects throughout the economy. The goal of the program is to have standby power usage fall below 1W in all products by 2010.'" It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used.
Then it will be using 0 watts. Much less than using standby.
The way we engineers do it is by pareto analysis - you try to cut out of the largest portion of your power consumption. I'd like to see what lines up as the numbers one two and three consumers of electricity, and how that compares to the cited 4%, and how much was saved by going to standby mode as it stands today. I'm guessing that there are better places to focus the effort, but perhaps that's just my own bias.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
I'm not sure the effort and materials costs associated with replacing a power supply are worth $24 per year...
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
Are the five seconds to bring your computer out of hibernate really that critical? Hibernate takes 0W if you switch off your PSU when you walk away.
Some always-on devices are just plain stupid. Like computers: remember when computer PSUs had a physical switch that cut the power to the computer? when they replaced that with a soft power button that connected to the motherboard, they replaced a perfectly working system with one that didn't bring much at all to anybody, save for people who need to remote-boot through a network card and for people who are too dumb to stop the OS before the machine, and created the hateful power-button-that-doesn't-work-when-the-OS-crashes syndrome. Not to mention the extra power consumption...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The amount saved is so minimal. You can make it sound large when you multiply it by the entire population, but if you compare that to the GDP of the nation, the amount saved is even more minimal!
Plus, who will feed the starving families of the power companies when we all start using $24 less of power each year!
I think this coupled with a small, cheap solar install on every rooftop could significantly cut power usage. With advances like this this, its doable - not to power your house, but to help distribute generation capacity and smooth out load peaks. Of course, solar cell manufacture consumes a lot of energy and can create industrial waste issues, but the point is to get the power generation somewhere dirty and concentrated, rather than smogging up everything.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Make electricity more expensive, then people will make a huge effort save power... Take advantage of capitalism.
Think how much less we'd pollute if we could close down 4 out of every 100 power plants.
I'm guessing about 4% less. That's still not much.
You're right, few people are going to bother with replacing power supplies because it's just not worth it economically to replace them.
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs. Right now most consumers have no idea the amount of money it costs them for these inefficient electronics, so there's no incentive for manufacturers to bother.
AccountKiller
You want to fight the war on power consumption? Incandescent light bulbs. In regards to energy consumption, they are perhaps the most inefficient piece of technology today; and they are everywhere.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
Given my general observation at work places that most people don't even bother switch to stand-by power and just leave their computers on, I think encouraging people to put the computers is a good start, even if not perfect. Ideally it would be nice to be able to have computers hibernate, but then if you want to work from home, then there is no solution to wake them up. The wake-on-Lan solutions that I have seen only work on computers in stand-by.
At one of the places where I worked I implemented a web page which you could access from the VPN, and type in your PC name and it would wake up your office computer, if in stand-by.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't think they mean that the per-hour cost of standby power exceeds the per-hour cost of having the device on but rather that you may have a device which uses 7W in standby 22hrs/day and 60W on for 2hrs/day (LCD TV?). This means that on the average day, the device uses 154W in standby and 120W while in use. Over the lifetime of the device (say, 900 days), the device uses 30KW more in standby than it did while in use. Another example of this is your hot water heater/tank. If you have an older, less insulated tank, you may be able to reduce your hot water power usage by more than 50% by getting an on-demand water heater which eliminates standby power usage.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
And that is better than saving an entire _coal_ power plant... how?
I know Georgia Tech went on a campaign a few years back to replace as many incandescent bulbs as possible.
As part of it they replaced all of the 300 watt bulbs in the Van Leer build (old EE building) with 20 watt fluorescent lamps. Each lab probably had 10-15 twenty of these power hogs. After the switch our labs were freezing cold! All that extra cooling wasn't needed any more.
Over the course of a year it saves the institute over 2 million dollars. the first million was in direct power reduction, the second million was due to reduction in cooling cost.
Is here at the Financial Times.
Wasteful television standby settings and the energy efficiency of computers and water heaters are to be targeted in a new legislative drive aimed at slicing 100bn a year from the European Union's energy bill, in a move that could impose Europe's green agenda on the world. Stringent new European Commission energy efficiency targets for items such as electrical appliances and cars could set new global standards, since all imports into the European market would have to comply.
Some previous EU deadlines have resulted in some pretty dismal performances (the Lisbon agreement springs to mind), but the EU's very high standards for energy efficiency and recycling have been adhered to across the continent with admirable results. Not to mention the fact that EU enforced limits on car pollution (as one example) have led to high efficiency cars in Europe and across the globe, as manufacturers are forced to comply with EU levels to gain access to the EU market.
The proposed regulations - including extensions of existing rules - would impose European energy efficiency standards on any company worldwide seeking access to the EU's 480m consumers, including US manufacturers. European standards and norms in the car sector and mobile telephony have already become accepted in many countries worldwide, to the annoyance of Washington, which believes the EU sets too many rules.
If there is one criticism that is levelled at the EU a lot, is that it sets too many rules. But the high standards they have raised in efficiency for cars and electronics (think about those EU energy labels on all fridges, freezers and so on, they've come a long way from D's and E's a decade ago, how much energy did that initiative save?), so it's A-OK by me.
I could not find the exact quote. I believe it was on the Department of Energy website, but my search skills are letting me a bit down right now. I did however find a number of related quotes which give an indication.
(Source)
(Source) This is a nice source, with on the last page of the PDF a table with consumption per device. "Instant-on TV: 18317 million KWH/year)(Source; With the UK population being around 60 million and the USA around 300 million people, I guess it is reasonably safe to assume that if the UK needs already 1 power plant for standby, the USA also needs at least one)
(Source)
Yeah nice one. Now you're just spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Unless you and/or your employer signed up for wind generated power, your laptop runs on electricity probably generated by one of these 3 things:
1) A nuclear power plant,
2) a coal fired plant that generates steam that then runs turbines to generate electricity,
3) another power plant with coal replaced by natural gas.
Or, you live in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon - and get 90 percent of your power from hydroelectricity, and you can buy green power (wind or solar) to replace the last 10 percent.
Or, you live in Ontario, Quebec, Vermont and other places that buy cheap hydropower from Quebec.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Then you don't use any gas, and the world is saved! Of course, your food spoils before it can get to you, but you didn't waste any petroleum!
0 watts is better than >0 watts, but only if EVERYTHING ELSE IS EQUAL.
But it's not. If you turn off your computer instead of leaving it on, that affects many things other than just how much power you are using while the computer is off. It means you have a boot squence where you use a *LOT* of power. And where you do a LOT of reading/writing to/from disk. And you have to sit around and wait for your computer to boot. And then reopen everything you closed when you shut-down.
Saving $24/year in power is not worth spending $25/year on failed hard drives. Or on time lost turning your computer on and off again. Or on the power you use booting the thing back up.
paintball
You got that right. If they just made TVs, VCRs and stereos with non-volatile RAM and a battery powered clock, we could just shut them all off with a power strip. It's no big deal to flip the switch on the power strip when I get home.
Well, that works for goods that are relatively easily shipped, not to mention produced. Cigarettes are light and compact (as are DVDs for that matter, since they certainly do get bootlegged). Something tells me that bootlegging gasoline and electricity won't happen, simply because it's not feasable.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?