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Computers Causing 2nd Hump In Peak Power Demand
Hugh Pickens writes "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. 'It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau,' says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. '8 p.m. is kind of a recent phenomenon.' Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. 'Without a doubt, there's demand' for green PCs, says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point, adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."
Just change the air time of American Idol to 6:00pm and turn politics to 8:00-9:00pm
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Easiest way to fix these humps in power demand is to disable stanby/hibernation and leave computers on all day!!
The free market is actually coming up with solutions?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I just leave mine on all day!
What, in fact, is the typical power consumption of various displays (CRT, plasma, LCD direct-view, LCD projector, white light-source DLP, LED-source DLP, etc.)? Which gadgets should I most concern myself with turning off first?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Traditional peak power hours -- the time during the day when power demand shoots up -- run from 4 pm to 7 pm when air conditioning begins to ramp up
But what about those of us who DON'T live in Texas? I only use my air conditioning 3-4 months a year, and not consistantly then. I haven't had it on for weeks; I ran the (gas) furnace this morning.
And most people I know (granted, most of tem aren't nerds) turn the TV on as soon as they get home. How did they come to the conclusion that computers are causeing the spike?
Maybe folks are eating dinner later and it's that George Foreman electric grill and 750 watt microwave nuking dinner that's causing it?
Sorry, I didn't read the linked blagh. Were there some useful stats garnered from real research, or was it a slanted piece like it seemed from its URL?
Free Martian Whores!
the other 90%?
"Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis."
And to further confuse things, would most of the time when things are idle apply to those 50 hours that it's at 10%?
1. Offer to sell electricity at a fixed rate by the hour
2. Broadcast the price through the outlet
3. Let appliances display the current (ahah) hourly rate
\u262D = \u5350
As prices fall, folks are bigger and more electronics, thereby nullifying any power savings. And when you consider that everything these days being developed needs to be plugged in, it's only going to get worse. I don't buy much, if any electronics, but the folks who need the latest blinky power hungry electronic gadget outnumber people like me.
PC can run on hand crank or hair grease and it still will be far from Green.
I may be just a tad bitter about technology, because I expected flying cars, limitless energy, and cure for cancer. But the only thing we seem to be getting over the last couple of years is new gadgets and "better" TVs.
I hope that the 'market' comes up with many of the ones that I can think of.
Battery UPS in your PC case... stores power for power outages and uses the battery during startup cycles, thus spreading the draw from the grid to less used times.
EU just made incandescent lights illegal.
Green design homes
Light timer switches with built-in motion sensors and other such devices.
More efficient solar energy. Windows with solar collectors built-in as well as LED lighting so that daylight can continue unabated.
The list goes on. Anything that prevents a 250 watt drain on the grid during peak times will reduce the problem dramatically if millions of homes participated. Say 2 million homes used 250W/hr less at peak times for any given grid supply area: 500MegaWatt hour savings. That's a lot of savings.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Except the last portion of the last sentence. What do "medical enterprise customers" have to do with anything else in that article?
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
Has the penetration rate of computers and TVs gone up recently? I doubt it.
If fact, I bet the effciency is the only thing going up. The flatscreen that replaced my tube TV uses LESS power. And the core 2 uses LESS power than the PIV it replaced.
LCDs were supposed to SAVE power, compared to CRTs.
Looks like those claims were bullshit.
(Yeah, it's a known fact that LCD power usage has done nothing but skyrocket as displays have gotten better. I just like bringing it up because it was one of the big advantages the manufacturers touted over CRTs.)
This is not the same as having cars feeding power back into the grid, which is what most of the rest of the article is about. Seems like the reporter is confusing the two concepts.
only one real solution here
more power
As far as I can see this is just a bs sensationalizing fluff story. I work for a multi state power utility as an engineer and we have no such issues.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.
That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.
The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
This is a little off-topic, but there's an analogous jump for bandwidth.
I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:
9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage
If the 10% of capital equipment was previously only being used during peak hours and we extend peak hours in a plateau we will increase capital utilization and be able to reduce the cost of energy. This isn't a joke. That is actually what will happen if what the post says is true. Filling in the valleys in capacity utilization will result in a more efficient energy infrastructure. That is why hybrid cars are so efficient.
I have long suggested that appliances should be smart, and I should be able to set a monthly power budget and let my appliances figure out together how to optimally function to meet that budget.
You don't even need to broadcast the price through the outlet to do this. Each device should be able to measure its own power consumption and if I have budgeted X number of kilowatts for the month they should collectively figure out how to achieve that.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Cost.
If it made economic sense, power companies would be paying you (er..heavy users) to install batteries.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis.
So when customers buy more energy (actually the proper term) but spread it out over a longer period of time, this is bad how, exactly? It would seem that spreading the peak out is a good thing, from the capital investment point of view. It was a good thing when everyone proposed plug in hybrids that could charge off peak.
What they really seem to be bitching about is energy, not power. Energy == fuel (and CO2, in many cases) so this is a legitimate beef. But the power company folks should be happy when we stay up later watching p0rn.
Have gnu, will travel.
The power companies should stop complaining and upgrade their equipment. Can't buy enough power from your current providers? Build wind farms, invest in alternative energy sources.
They're in business to make money. If people bought more "green" devices and started using less power, the power companies would make less money, and they would increase their rates to compensate.
For every action there is a completely absurd lawsuit.
"Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system"."
How much would we save if all computers hibernated during non usage? Or had smart UPSes that turned everything off and on instead of running 24/7?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
For saying that this isn't free market you sure did a great job explaining the OP's case for him.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
You won't find a more efficient design on the market right now. Samsung's 67" LED DLP set draws about 120 watts.
A quick google finds these:
65" Panasonic Plasma at 800W.
65" Olevia LCD (probably CFL backlit) at 540W.
55" Samsung LED-backlit LCD at 250W (note that this set is smaller than the rest)
My employers make and sell consumer television sets.
One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).
They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Welcome to retarded. Going green used to be about garbage and pollution -- which at least had air-quality in mind. But reducing power usage -- especially electrical power usage -- is such a bad idea I'm calling it a super-bad idea (or should that be a sub-bad idea?).
First-off, Intel and AMD aren't reducing power to be green. They are reducing power as a part of miniturization -- smaller circuits can't use more power without shorting. Server farms of thousands of computers care about power only on the bottom line, it's not about being green.
So what's going to happen in ten years when the next power surge is everyone plugging in their cars at night? And what happens when they charge in minutes instead of hours?
Going green is not the way humans in a capitalist business society solve problems. If you're asking 500 million people to use less electricity, you'll maybe get 50 million using 5% less. Congratulations. And with each passing year, you have Africa using 999999% more. What will you do in fifty years when the global first-world is thirty times larger?
In our societies, you solve problems by finding new business opportunities that decrease requirements by orders of magnitude across the entire population -- not 5% on a per-human basis.
And in order to present those new business ideas with contrast, you use MORE of the offending substance. Not less. More. You use MORE gasoline as a society, and then it becomes MORE worthwhile for a new business to replace that gasoline with something else -- telecommute, hybrid, fuel cell, electricity. If our gasoline requirements were double what they are now -- ehem, when they are double what they are now (in terms of volume and price together), electric cars will save you more money, and there'll be a reason to start replacing gas stations with charging stations. You'll have turn-key telecommuting solution, and video conferencing solutions will become more plentiful. Right now? Right now you have "eh, for that much, I'll just fly them in and forget the teleconference".
You want more efficient solar panels? Something more than the 20% you get today, and the 30% the lab gets today? Use twice as much electricity, and someone will spend the money to develop better solar cells. Right now? It's still more expensive -- and more polluting -- than gasoline. Which is why no one uses them.
So, in summary:
1. asking people to use less means very few people use very little less.
2. using less means less of a problem means no point in solving the problem.
3. using the problem means more of the problem means greater benefit to solving the problem.
4. solving the problem in the correct place means an order-of-magnitude benefit to the entire society (now most of the world).
Drink up.
In Abraham Lincoln's time this wasn't a problem. Moving back to that level of industrialization and population will eliminate this situation. It will also eliminate global warming/climate change, most forms of pollution and most resource consumption issues.
It is a little difficult to build a DVD player using 1850's technology, but heck Mr. Lincoln didn't have anywhere near the carbon footprint of someone living today either. True sustainability means living within the natural limits of the planet and not consuming resources at a faster pace than natural replenishment. You want sustainable? Then this is the only available route.
.. peak power availability occurs in daylight, when conventional generation can be topped-up using solar. if peak consumption is moving towards the late evening and nighttime hours, this represents a future issue.
PHEV charging demand was seen as a good thing as the night was seen as a low-demand time. Maybe thats not going to be the case soon....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Ive seen a TV program where these people on an island were powering a radio and washing their clothes using a bicycle and a couple of coconuts, so why do we have an energy problem?
So, having a ridiculous number of video cards in my rig is noticeable to the power company? Is that what all those letters have been about?
Car battery capacity is usually between 40-60 amp-h. That is, if you wanted to use battery power for three hours of peak, you would get (generous estimation) of 20 amp-h per battery. Your battery gives 12 volts, and, again under ideal conditions you should get 12*20 = 240 W-h per battery for the peak time.
A standard light bulb is 100 watts. Your plasma TV may be 800-1200 watts.
Thus to run the TV for three hours you would need five batteries, and that assumes that you could run them to dry. Lead acid batteries can produce surge power pretty well, but it would likely be cost prohibitive unless you could get a lot of duty cycles out of them.
Looking at Sears -- a cheap car battery is around $50. Electricity costs $0.08 per kwh where I am. Thus to equal the cost of one battery you would need to produce 50/.08 = 625 KW-h of electricity before being spent. That is 625,000 W-h or 1,000 charge cycles.
I'm not sure if a battery can handle this before getting corroded and functioning badly. Of course, this is only the cost of the battery, and really what you care about is the delta cost from night and day electricity. Additionally, people could not use retail car batteries but could get cheaper lead-acid apparatuses.
At delta cost of $.05 per kw-h, then if you could get more than 1000 charge cycles from the battery, then anything above this is profit on the order of $.05 KWh * 1kW * 3h = $.15 = 15 cents per day for your plasma. Is it worth it?
The short answer is no. The long answer is probably not.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
>no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
The capital cost is set by the highest peak, yes.
On the other hand, every time demand goes above base load the utilities start switching in plants with higher operating costs. That secondary peak doesn't require any new generating stations, but it does potentially fire up some gas turbines that could otherwise have stayed idle for a few hours more.
They invented the flying car in 1903, it's called an "airplane".
To anyone who has ever said "Yeah and where the F's my flying car!?" (and a LOT including myself are guilty)I now have an answer. It seems that flying cars were around way before the concept of flying cars was even thought up.
CRTs are power hogs, but your laser printer is the biggest power hog of your computer system. The fuser gets up to 2k F to melt the toner on the paper.
My CRT is on 24/7, yet I print only once or twice a month. So, which appliance is consuming more power, the steady drain of 1500 watts for a month, or the infrequent peak drain of 5000 watts for 20 seconds? You can't look at the watts only. You have to look at the duration of use. That's why your electricity bill is in kilowatt hours and not simply kilowatts. It's the energy that matters, not the power.
Also, if the fuser hit 2000 F it would burn the paper, and likely melt the surrounding plastic of the printer and set it on fire. Fusers run at 350-400 F (200ish celcius).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
tag proposal: 'Vista'
in a few years time, the batteries from the first batch of Toyota Prius / Honda Insight hybrid cars will be getting down to about the 50% efficiency point where it makes sense to replace them.
How about if all these 50%-degraded car packs get resold as home power storage? They're still good enough for that if they are cheap enough, and it puts off the need to recycle their chemicals for a few more years....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I was staring at my a/c compressor on Saturday, and I couldn't figure out the logic for how it was situated. It's on the sunny side of the house, about 6 inches from the wall. What this means is that it's easily got an extra 10F to overcome from the sunlight alone and the airflow is restricted so it's just warming up the nearby air that it's trying to use as a heat sink.
It just seems to me that an a/c compressor that was on the shady side of the house and maybe 10+ feet away would run somewhat more efficiently.
Maybe it's only a 3 or 4 percent difference in overall performance but multiply that by 50 million air conditioners and that would have a noticeable effect on the peak.
"The problem is that, generally speaking, a few large generators are more efficient than a whole bunch of small ones. "
I've heard this statement over the years as a way to justify centralization. Any sources to back this up considering improvements in technology on both ends?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
85w usage versus four to six times that if using LCD/Plasma. LCD gets up there more than people like to think.
Fortunately for me DLP works out fine as I know the proper placement of furniture versus tv and windows so that there is never an image problem. It is not ideal for some but most homes any tv works out fine.
that and I like the fact my DLP weighs a lot less as well. Made positioning it easy and the newest units (mine uses an LED to drive the screen) are wall mountable too
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Has anyone done a study to see if there is any correlation between the peak in power consumption caused by computers and the peak in computer-user's pants shortly afterwards?
How about making extremely BIG gov. funding for people who want to turn their house green and off the grid, not like 20% of the cost, more like 75% of the cost, with a catch that all the extra electricity not used, belongs to the gov. and gets thrown back into the grid.
This would stimulate more people to make the change and allow also more of a competitive market.
I use a 50" screen as my primary display for my computer. I didn't have room for a desk so it became an all-in-one entertainment/computing center.
In short:
My electric bill sucks.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Convert everything to DC.
Given my very limited electronic's knowledge:
AC can't be stored, DC can...every house have a 10,000 fared capacitor (or larger, I'm just tossing a number out there). All of them connected. Have a neighborhood lightning rod. Each house connected to the cap, which is then connected to the grid....
Problem solved.
Sounds like more evidence that we need to develop large scale commercial batteries, or capacitors to store the energy generated during lulls in demand. Their is also the wind/wave/solar generating facilites poping up like weeds that are inherently inconsistent in their energy generating capacity.
I live in Indiana and their are articles once a week it seems about all the new wind turbines going up in Northern Indiana. Less of those peak generators would be needed if we could store the energy generated at night or in moderate weather for use during peak hours.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
My humps! My humps! My lovely lady lumps! Check it out!
I've measured the power consumption of my various devices, using a Kill-A-Watt meter.
Let's take computers first. My iMac (core duo, 20" LCD) uses 60 watts on average, with spikes up to 70 watts. When I am using the computer, I have the room lighting reduced. I'd use more power if I turned off the computer, and turned the lights up to a comfortable level for, say, reading.
My gaming PC (3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 gig of RAM, GeForce 9800 GT, 22" LCD display) uses 200 watts when running around in a war camp in Warhammer Online.
How about the TV? I've got a 61" DLP set, HD DVR cable box, surround sound receiver, plus a DVD player and a Wii. When watching TV, with the DVD player and Wii off but consuming standby power, the whole setup is consuming 300 watts.
I'm single, so that probably IS more power than I'd consumer if I were, say, reading, instead of watching TV. But the typical household has more than one person. Two or more people sharing a TV will probably be using less power than if they were off doing separate activities. E.g., two parents and two kids watching TV would be using less power than if Ward was in the den reading, June was in the living room sewing, and Wally and Beaver were in their room doing homework.
I understand why having a tall, narrow 'hump' in electric demand is a bad thing... it means that lots of expensive generating equipment is used only briefly, making it hard to pay for. However, if the 'hump' is getting wider, that should be a good thing. The equipment gets more use, more electricity is sold, the equipment gets paid for. What am I missing here?
I'm doing my part, I just leave all my equipment on at all times. No humps for me.
Without a doubt, there's demand,' for green PC's
Not true, I sell computers and at my store we have a 'green' tower that uses 70% less power then the other towers. For the entire month that we have had these towers, I have sold 0 of them, and it isn't because I haven't been trying.
Is 120VDC safe? Is it as safe as AC?
Yes and no. On one side, AC can trigger atrial fibrillation, bringing your heart to a stop. On the other, DC could make you clamp tighter onto a voltage source, reducing your likelihood of getting away, and increasing your likelihood of getting electrocooked.
DC is also more likely to cause arcing. An AC supply's voltage crosses zero twice per cycle, which extinguishes the arc, while a DC voltage remains constant. If you look at the ratings stamped into switches, the DC current rating for a switch will always be quite a bit smaller than the AC current rating (if there's a DC rating at all).
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Points of interest -
1. The Shockley-Queisser Limit doesn't give a rat's ass whether you use twice as much electricity. There are limits to solar conversions.
2. The point of the article is to solve a problem. Not to make less of a problem. To solve a problem. I repeated it for comprehension. The problem is that the cheapest forms of generation -- coal and (with caveats) nuclear -- are cheap because the plants work well at producing base-load power. They run at a constant rate. So they are ill-equipped to handle peaks in demand. That is done with less efficient gas plants that can handle being turned off and on quickly.
So the problem solve is levelizing the peaks in demand. This is a problem of deviations from the mean, and is INDEPENDENT of the total amount consumed.
*poof* there goes your argument. Since you didn't bother to understand the problem, I'm not sure why I should take your pro-consumption rant seriously.
I retrofitted my 24x7 home machines to Earthwatts supplies earlier last year and immediately noted very significant $$s savings. I figure there just need to be a couple high publicity articles on large companies saving millions with these before every company wants it, every computer comes with it, and people will wonder how we ever got along without it.
Therefore, this "second hump" does not require more extra generating/transmission equipment at all, because it is still within the existing capacity, just shifted into a later timeslot. Therefore the second hump represents a whole lot of energy use that the power corps can charge money for, but which requires only more fuel, not more overhead infrastructure (and probably not much more manpower at all). Therefore power corps must love the second hump, because it's lots of extra profit with only a tiny extra reinvestment. It's more of their expensive capacity producing revenue for more of its lifetime, which is a solution to power corps' problem of keeping that extra capacity around for spikes.
It's also a good way for power demand to increase, if it is going to (and it is going to). Because those appliances are great targets for replacement with more efficient devices. OLED and other more efficient displays, and better home-wide power management (like smart homes/vehicles/offices that power up only when the people are actually within range to use them) are relatively small innovations. More and more of our power consumption is DC, instead of AC, which can also benefit from home-wide DC supplies, rather than a wasteful adapter per device (vampiring power even when the device is disconnected, but the adapter isn't). And home generation from solar and some other alternate supplies generate DC, which the devices can consume directly, rather than losses inverting into AC and then rectifying back into DC.
So this is actually good news. If we use it right, anyway.
--
make install -not war
We're headed for a 24/7 peak power period. It all about efficiency, ironically.
...for a plugin hybrid or pure electric car. One cent a kilowatt hour is dang hard to beat. Heck, even going to a whole house battery system (as an alternative to the car, which are still mostly unobtanium or real pricey like a Tesla), you might come out ahead by just charging up a battery bank at night and using the juice during the day, plus, it gives you a whole house UPS system (or individual circuits of your choice, such as for the fridge/freezer/ or furnace for ice storms when the lines go down from tree branches, the home office, etc).
Lower energy consumption does not necessarily equal green.
Damn, that's a big capacitor. No wonder it sucks the grid dry.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As long as it's cheaper to run filler power plants than smarter solutions there's nothing for the power companies to complain about.
1. Variable price per kWh, announced by modulation on the power line (yes, it is being used, but only in very few places)
2. MW/MWh batteries like sodium-sulfur and vanadium redox.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The best way to prevent any negative affects, is to ensure we practice safe protection with all this humping
...a yard boy? muahahahahaha! I guess you rake in just a *scosh* more BernankeBingoBux than I do! I can afford a Tesla..Tonka! Anyway, sounds like you got that covered. Now do the whole house battery/UPS deal. Go ahead, I'll spend your money for ya!
..what's called a charge controller for your solar panels BEFORE it feeds into the batteries, and then you might as well just then complete the rig with a charger/inverter device (here, check out xantrex company, they have some info and a product range). That's the proper way to do a solar rig with battery backup. You get the solar input when it is there, you get grid input when you might need it, both sources go to the batteries, the batteries feed back to the charger/inverter and that goes to your circuit box. Then it is seamless and automatic, mostly just do battery maintenance once a month or something, top off with distiled water. Direct connection solar panel to device is only for the most low powered gadgets with a a very small solar panel. And the reason is solar panels are unregulated voltage, the brighter/sunnier, the more you get, sometimes over 20 volts on a panel (conversely I have seen half a volt from a full moon!). There isn't much lost in a modern system, don't worry about it. If you really just want pure DC, with zero grid ties at all, that is doable, look for "off grid" or marine or RV packages/systems and how they are designed. You eliminate the inverter part, but keep the rest. They come in multiples of 12, 12 vdc, 24 and 48 are the most common. You *will* need the appropriate charge controller though, to sit between the panels and the batteries, or you will cook your batteries. And you can get 12 vdc power supplies designed for mini itx cheap enough if that sort of machine would work for you instead of the atx desktop.
How much would we save if all computers hibernated during non usage?
Mu.
A lot of PC hardware doesn't come out of hibernation fully functional. I've seen plenty of computers come out of XP hibernation to a black screen, or no sound, or whatever. In order to get your suggestion to happen, PC device driver developers would have to invest a wad of dough for more quality assurance than they have been doing. Besides, servers connected to a network, such as a home media server or a small business web server, have to be ready to serve a request at any time; people usually can't wait 20 seconds.
Looking at the time and trend this can be caused from people turning on lights, cooking using microwave & stoves & ovens, sports center turn on lights and other electrical based activities after they come home from work and other activities so blaming it solely on computers is incorrect with facts.
I am one of those people who come home evening but don't start making dinner until 8P, that is if I'm making dinner that evening, since we have other activities before that (ie Soccer). I assume this is similar to most people who have children in extra-curricular activities so you add up all of the people doing them same thing you will get a electrical usage "hump" like that.
What's Instacare?
Google turned up a website with what to do if your doctor's office is closed and a BlueCross plan in Minnesota ($1,000 a year for a single guy, no pre-exisiting conditions, you're out $300 deductible, covered for 80% until you pay $930, and then they cover up to a million - sounds good).
Several years back I came across an article -I can't remember where- that indicated that the greatest power usage, in Southern California, occurred between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM and it was for -of all things- the drying of clothing.
Sig this!
I don't think I'll ever stop getting annoyed at Americans whining about fuel bills, whether they be petrol, gas or electricity.
I pay the best part of $200 per month to power my 850 square foot apartment in Manchester, and I'm *careful* with my electricity usage. I hardly use the heating, I have one 24x7 Mac Mini and I use energy saving light bulbs.
Couple that with our $6.30/gallon petrol prices (which is "cheap" at the moment) and I'm afraid that I've no sympathy or time for Americans droning on about fuel prices.
There is some footage around somewhere showing a meter in a UK power station taking the hit.
As borizz notes, there's nothing to say that you can force an appliance to override your pre-set power budget, or alter the budget itself.
Obviously if you set an unrealistic or unmeetable budget but you still want, say, the air conditioner or TV or microwave to run, you'll want a way to override the budget.
So what's the point of setting the budget then? By allowing the consumer to try and cap energy spending to a level they are comfortable with and alerting them when they exceed it so they can choose whether the additional cost is really necessary or not.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Check out the Pico PSU. It is tiny and efficient, and it takes 12v DC as input. Sure, it's limited to 120w, but that's enough for a dual-core 45nm Core2 with an on-board GPU, plus the usual hard drive and DVD.
The control circuits for balancing power dynamically between the grid and solar cells are a little more complicated...but that too is a solved problem.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I have always been under the impression that a 42" LCD consumes significantly less power when on than the 27" CRT it replaced. WHich,judging by the ehat output alone, would be common sense form my POV.
Is this article telling me I have always been misled, or is it talking about plasma only?
...I have three computers that are on 24/7. 450, 550, and 750 watts. (My father's computer, my old machine/fileserver, and my current workstation/gaming rig, respectively) And five medium-to-large flatpanel displays. And these numbers aren't likely to go DOWN. Though, our only 'television', is a DLP projector, which I'm fairly sure consumes less power than a CRT. Oh yeah, we also basically run the A/C from May through September because we are physiologically incompatible with hot weather.
So yeah, I can believe that all the computers out there are putting a little strain on the power grid now and again. ;o
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I've always been very fond of Star Trek, it hasn't only started getting us craving to see the moon, it also got us ideas towards the modern future.
Life imitates art; everything is created by mankind; only one has to jump on the bandwagon to start with it before it'll be accepted or rejected.
The world is full of ideas too, it's just how and when. I'm 32 and i've been a very early adopter for a lot of computer and audio-visual technologies. The only one thing that REALLY changed is: things got a lot cheaper thanks to SMD components, less reliable too! It has been converted to the ultimate throw-away-society where that piece of plastic is nothing worth than a re-sale.
I can still remember the first C64 I touched, the first Amstrad PC1512 I've had with 4 gray"colors" and funky speaker with volume control, my TRS-80, thrilling experiences with Basic, Turbo/Borland Pascal and Asm, my first modem and bbs system and much more.
I've been thinking lately for a lot of applications and tools which don't exist .. yet .. and why? We're in 2008..
The market is becoming saturated, which sure gives the wrong impression technology has come to a halt; it has just slowed down a bit because there is just too much to buy! People don't know what to choose anymore; which is per-se not a bad thing for versatility in selection.
Too many people think too "digital" while there is still a complete wide open analog world ready to explore!
Still, we're in 2008, ages later and still at war. Maybe it's a good thing humanity limits itself from advancing too fast..
As long as some of us can't control our power, we sure don't need the technology to rule such power!
Wasn't that money and powerhunger something which started the Federation in ST:TOS ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..