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Re:An efficient power converter design reduces resting power... by jacobolus on Thursday March 16, 2017 @08:39PM (#13890409)
200+ GWh/year is a rounding error on world scale, where yearly total electricity generation is at least 1e5 times larger.
Re:An efficient power converter design reduces resting power... by undersuit on Thursday March 16, 2017 @10:53PM (#13891012)
Just TVs. Just one type of consumer product needs a full Power Plant added to the earth every year to support their standby draw. Yes this assumes that a significant proportion will be plugged in, but it adds up.

Just TVs, not monitors, not computers, not audio receivers, not game consoles, not microwave ovens, not etc. I doubt the cost of designing this converter even approaches the yearly cost of a power plant.

Re:An efficient power converter design reduces resting power... by lorenzhs on Friday March 17, 2017 @05:51AM (#13892750)
200 GWh/year is a little less than 23 MW. A full power plant is on the order of several hundred MW to around a GW. You also don't need to replace the power plant every year. I agree that standby power usage is terribly wasteful but your calculation is off by a large factor.
Re:An efficient power converter design reduces resting power... by nwah1 on Friday March 17, 2017 @11:26AM (#13894675)
Given the Jevons Paradox, we can predict that the lower energy use will translate to higher demand for IoT technologies, thus increasing the world energy requirements for these devices.