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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!!
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!
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
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.
Plasma displays use less than CRT, LED uses less than plasma.
A space heater uses more juice than just about anything in your house save your AC or (if it's electric) your water heater. Your toaster comes in a good second (while it's actually toasting, which isn't long) followed by your microwave.
If a device's primary purpose is to heat something, it uses a shitload of electricity.
All your electric appliances/gizmos are rated in watts. Just RTFM, it's usually listed on the back page. If you have no FM it usually says on the back of the appliance how many watts it consumes.
Free Martian Whores!
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"
The free market is actually coming up with solutions?
No.
The fact this trend happening in consumer electronics is a boon to a straining power industry is an accident. (No, i'm not being sarcastic).
These companies have other, more important reasons for developing higher performance per watt.
The trend in computing is increasingly toward notebook ownership. Notebook battery life is increased by lower power consumption.
LCD displays also eat a lot of computer battery power.
It is in the best interest of the panel makers (whose panels end up in both TVs AND Computers) to increase the energy efficiency of their panels.
Flat panel tv's also benefit from this lower power consumption, which also serves as an excellent marketing angle for "those thrifty tree huggers".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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
I think I'd rather have the USA's free market, even with its fiscal problems, then what's going on in North Korea....
It's tree bark and it's good for you! And if you don't finish your supper, you'll go straight to your corner of the room without any seawater.
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
So, in other words, the consumers are demanding certain kinds of products, and the companies that make them are creating them.
Sounds remarkably a lot like the free market working.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You're young and naive; things don't move that fast. I'm 56 and the stuff that was science fiction when I was a kid has mostly already happened.
Look at Star Trek (it's dead, Jim). Self-opening doors? Yep, in every grocery store. Communucators? Yep, only we call them cell phones. Flat screen voice activated talking computers on a desk? Yep. When Star Trek came out the average computer wasn't much more powerful than today's scientific calculator and took a whole building to house, and cost millions of dollars. Say "Mom" into your Razr and it will dial your mother.
Some other things we didn't have included digital clocks, the internet, CDs, DVDs, VCRs, microwave ovens, motion sensors, crack cocaine (some things alas should never be invented), antiviral drugs, antidepressant drugs, LEDs, LCDs, air bags in cars, fuel injectors in cars, or global warming.
In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan McCoy couldn't cure Kirk's age-related farsightedness. But Dr. Yeh cured mine!
In 2003 the FDA approved the CrystaLens eye implant. It was a life changing technology for me; as the linked journal says, I was very nearsighted all my life, and in middle age I became farsighted as well, using contact lenses AND reading glasses. I wear no corrective lenses at all now.
They invented the flying car in 1903, it's called an "airplane". There is more energy than I can use coming from the wall sockets in my home, is that not "limitless" for all practical purposes? And they can in fact cure many cancers these days provided it is caught soon enough.
To this geezerly nerd, I'm living in a science fiction world. You might be interested to read Growing up with computers. I think you are likely to see as much progress in your life by the time you reach my age as I have. Unless I croak soon I expect to see even more technological miracles.
Free Martian Whores!
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)
For saying that this isn't free market you sure did a great job explaining the OP's case for him.
This guy said this is an example of a free market "working"
free markets work on supply and demand.
These companies are not responding to power companies' complaints. The power company is not benefiting from a free market, just a fortuitous but unrelated chain of events.
If the customers of laptops demanded obscene brightness, more screen real estate, and high performance short bursts of computing power, they'd put 17 CPU's and 4 panels on laptops and they'd suck the grid dry.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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
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?
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?
FYI, you don't need to notify the power company if your main disconnect only switches between utility and generator power (can't backfeed power because generator power can't get to the utility with the power transfer switch). On the other hand, you do need to notify the utility if you have a grid-tied inverter that feeds power back into the grid from solar/wind/etc. Note though that the utility needs to do nothing to disconnect you when they're working on the lines. NEC code requires grid-tie inverters to completely disconnect the utility feed when it detects utility power has been shutdown, so they can't feed power back when line workers are working on the lines (like after a large storm). Also, you are required to have master disconnection on the exterior of your home that the utility or line workers can lock, but that shouldn't affect power to your house if you're generating, only your ability to sell power back to the utility during the disconnect time.
Disclaimer: My experience on this is from permitting/installing solar and wind grid-tie systems, as well as from a good friend who is an electrical line worker.
1) More efficient drivetrains for cars -> we immediately think "kewl, now I can use a bigger motor and go 0-60 in 4 seconds!"
2) Lower power semiconductors just let us ramp up the GHz.
3) Better insulated homes, we buy bigger homes with more empty rooms.
4) Ultimately now matter how energy efficient we become, it will just make the carrying capacity that much higher (i.e. more affordable to have more kids).
All of these are good things - I like big flatscreens, fast cars, and kids as much as the next guy. But as for efficiency reducing mankind's footprint on the environment, I'm worried it might not happen.