Naive question here, but how much of the time would you expect cpus in a data center to idle? Also, you save 20% of idle (which is a sizable percentage, but not much in absolute wattage) and nothing when not idle (which is much higher wattage). So how much do you save per month overall?1%, 0.1%?

Well, if your goal is to reduce electricity consumption, the proper way would be to increase prices for it. It's just there might be easier and faster ways, not only improving idle CPU states.

I hate that approach so much. By increasing prices you're not reducing demand, you're just making it less affordable for people who might need it equally than those who are in better paid jobs etc.

I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process.

We shouldn't punish people less fortunate than ourselves for our own gluttony - which is all that raising prices would do.

>I prefer the approach of improving energy efficiency (short to mid term time scale) and investing in greener energy sources (mid to long term) to bide us time until nuclear fusion becomes viable and thus electricity consumption no longer becomes a harmful process.

Raising efficiency probably won't help at all due to Jevon's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"""

In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3]

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

"""

The Jevons Paradox is an extreme form of the rebound effect[0]. More normally, we expect efficiency gains to be only partly offset by changes in behaviour.

As an anecdotal example, we replaced one 60w incandescent bulb in our bathroom with 4 x 5w LED spotlight bulbs. This is both an increase in light, and a reduction in energy usage, even though it doesn't reflect the full efficiency gains of the LEDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

It doesnt have to be behaviour of the consumer. It can mean that the value proposition of application development can move to more less-efficient programs. e.g. we have more and more memory in computers so developers often say "meh, memory is cheap" when developing Electron apps that take hundreds of GB. This can definitely result in "meh, CPUs are efficient" (even if it's a non-sequitor in this case).

Fair point. We've definitely seen that trend happen where software will often be written to take advantage of the resources available rather than written to be efficient. Not just in recent times with Electron but throughout the evolution of GUI-driven operating systems (eg compositing desktops, themeing, pre-compositing animations, etc).

The gaming industry demonstrates this the most clearly but it's definitely present in general purpose computing as well. eg when Windows XP was first released (pre-service packs) it required twice the hardware specifications of Windows 2000 yet offered little functional difference (read: actual real world stuff that could be done on it) aside themeing.

Thankfully that trend with Windows has reversed somewhat but it's still ever-present with desktop software and their movement towards using web-based technologies.

> The gaming industry demonstrates this the most clearly

I think the gaming industry actually also demonstrates the opposite the most clearly.

I'm often blown away by how efficient some games are, and how well they take advantage of advances in hardware.

I look at something like World of Warcraft, a 14 year old game that has trouble running on my desktop computer despite its graphics being... limited to say the least. And then I look at Breath of the Wild. A patently stunning game.

And then I remember which one of the two is a mobile game.

light bulbs are hard to jevon, since an LED on all day still uses less energy than an incadescent that you turn off when you don't need it.

compute is EASY to jevon =)

On the contrary - the introduction of efficient LEDs has led to insane stuff like decorative building facade illumination which nobody would think of doing with incandescents, just because of replacement effort and energy usage. But with cheap LEDs the operating costs drop to the point where such an application becomes viable, and we get a new source of demand (and light pollution)

You're begging the question, which is not adding to the discussion.

Saying efficiency leads to increased usage is not the same thing as saying increased usage balances efficiency 100%.

It reminds me of people who argued that airbags and ABS lead to people taking more risk when driving. That may be a real effect, but nevertheless, casualties have declined.

I quite believe that phenomena is true for industry but I would be surprised if it still applied to electricity consumption in consumer devices. The cost of power there is pretty low in real terms (low enough that few consumers will factor the cost of running a device into account for general* computing devices or other household goods) but the collective savings from energy efficient hardware at a national scale is massive. So I couldn't see people buying a second mobile phone or laptop just because it's more energy efficient).

The question of datacentres is another matter though. But they only respond to demand from people like ourselves who lease computing time from them / place our own hardware in their racks.

* I'm not counting mining (bitcoin et al), home servers, media centres, etc. where it's more likely running costs will be factored into the buying decision. However these are uncommon compared to other hardware like laptops, desktop PCs, games consoles, mobile phones, TVs, fridges, kettles, etc.

People definitely buy more and bigger TVs if their cost of operation is cheaper. They also buy more power-hungry phones – energy efficiency increases in general haven’t turned into energy savings! More efficient use of energy also simply makes people have less incentives to conserve it (switching off lights and appliances when not used, turning down heating/AC, driving less, and so on).

Interesting points but I only agree with one of the 3 examples you've provided:

> People definitely buy more and bigger TVs if their cost of operation is cheaper.

In all my years I have never, ever, heard anyone say that until now. People buy bigger TVs because it's cheaper to buy, or because they offer better features (smart, 3D, 4k, curved, etc) or because they move house and their new room is bigger so want something proportional. Or even just because they're used to their old TV and want a visible upgrade.

However I have never heard anyone say "this TV is bigger than my old one because it's cheaper to run".

(obviously I'm not saying "nobody in the history of consumers have said what you claim", but I would be astounded if that was a normal buying trend. More likely it's a niche quirk you've exampled)

> They also buy more power-hungry phones – energy efficiency increases in general haven’t turned into energy savings!

From what I gather, the trend for power-hungry phones have outstripped energy savings anyway. It's improvements in battery technology that have enabled people to continually upgrade. So I don't really see the cost of electricity vs energy consumption improvements being a deciding factor here.

> More efficient use of energy also simply makes people have less incentives to conserve it (switching off lights and appliances when not used, turning down heating/AC, driving less, and so on).

That's a fair point. It would be hard to judge just how significant that impact is though. But I definitely agree there will be people out there who do leave lights on because they're cheap to run.

Of course energy efficiency is not the only, or even primary reason. But it is there somewhere, and insofar as it isn’t (would people be willing to pay for 4x the energy use? 8x? 16x?) it is just evidence that energy is too cheap if people don’t need to think about it!

I do grant you that energy efficiency wins in many fixed appliances (washing machines, fridges, etc) do probably transfer directly to reduced energy usage by those appliances – but remember that energy is fungible, and reduced use here may and often will transfer to increased use there.

On the bigger TVs point, you’re sort of talking past each other. Noone* is buying a bigger TV because it suddenly fits within some power budget but nobody* would have bought a 60” CRT that heated the room like an oven. Nowadays, you’ll struggle to find a non-garbage TV much smaller than that.

The improved efficiency enables new uses which consume more energy, eating into the improvement.

* for small values of noone/nobody

The problem with 60" CRTs wasn't the heat it produced (or at least that was only a small part of the problem), it was the depth of the box. The depth of CRTs was related the width of the screen. This meant larger CRTs was often too deep to be practical (unlike Plasma and LCD which even in the earlier days could fit more flush against the side of the room or tighter into a corner). Schools, youth clubs, etc did have larger CRT TVs on a trolley but even those weren't 60" because storing that simply wasn't practical - it simply wouldn't have fit into many storage rooms. Even TV studios used a wall of monitors (which surely would have ran hotter) rather than one big monitor because of the space requirements.

Also lets not forget that back in the days of CRT everyone was still watching standard definition - which looks terrible on 60" displays (which possibly was also a deciding factor for TV studios using a wall of monitors rather than one big screen?). So there was a lot to be said for having the right sized screen to fit the output resolution. These days we have 4k and that will easily scale to 60 inches.

You’re still missing the point, which was that new technologies enable new uses that consume the energy efficiency gains made over their predecessors.

TFTs, being thinner/cooler/more efficient than CRTs, allow bigger and more common screens thus using some if not all of the energy saved from doing away with CRTs.

This is the same point as someone else made up the thread WRT the availability of RAM enabling developers to be more complacent about the efficiency of their applications.

I get the point you're making but my point was that I don't agree that energy efficiencies is what have lead to larger displays. At best I see that as a byproduct but honestly I think it's more of a parallel development. So I agree there is a correlation there but I don't agree with your conclusion of causation.

At least with the RAM example (where more RAM enables developers to write heavier software applications) there is a definite causation. However with regards to CRTs, I think we'd have seen the same trend to larger screens even without the drive to engineer more energy efficient hardware (and in fact we did see that with plasma screens back when they were in vogue. Plasma was favoured for bigger displays because it produced better looking screens* despite LCD being more energy efficient).

* better viewing angles, refresh rates, sharper display, better contrast

> I don't agree that energy efficiencies is what have lead to larger displays

That wasn’t my point, and was why I originally said that you and Sharlin seemed to be talking past each other.

LCDs took off because of their physical advantages (weight/thickness/heat, although the heat it produces has to be correlated with energy input) despite their shortcomings (fixed resolution, limited brightness and contrast ratio, response time) and plasma screens were an attempt to deal with those shortcomings but are now mostly dead. As you say, improved efficiency was correlative but not entirely causative.

A naive view would have been that as LCDs took off, their efficiency would lead to a drop in power consumption over CRTs. The Jevins paradox shows that not necessarily to be the case - bourne out by the proliferation of displays where previously there were none and in displays getting larger.

> A naive view would have been that as LCDs took off, their efficiency would lead to a drop in power consumption over CRTs. The Jevins paradox shows that not necessarily to be the case - bourne out by the proliferation of displays where previously there were none and in displays getting larger.

I think we'd need to run the maths before making any claims there tbh. We're getting dangerously into the realm of using assumptions as statistics. Points we'd need to consider:

* how much more efficient are LCDs compared to plasma and CRTs per square inch.

* how much did the trend to bigger screens proliferate with plasma vs LCD

* how has the cost of LCD and plasma screens changed over the last 20 years (this should be broken down by TVs with features such as smart TVs, 3D, HD, 4k, curved screens, etc)

* what about the uptake of said features on TVs?

* and lastly are those features only available on TVs of screen sizes > n?

* any other variables I've not considered? (I've only quickly thrown some thoughts together so there's bound to be some metrics I've missed)

I think the point you're making is a pretty hard conclusion to argue (or for me to refute) without any meaningful statistics to back it up. However it does still make for an interesting discussion so while the conclusion may remain unproven I have enjoyed the debate :)

Agreed - my point has a lot of hand waving, and have a +1 for it staying civil too :)

I would probably argue that integrating more (oxymoronically) “smart” stuff into TVs might have made them less efficient too but it probably helped because of increased integration, fewer <100% efficient power supplies etc.

"Nowadays, you’ll struggle to find a non-garbage TV much smaller than that"

I think that's an overstatement regarding 60 inches. I still have a 27" Samsung LCD TV that was high end when I bought it, but I did some light research and it appears that if I limit my choices to new 4K Samsung TVs that are in stock at a NYC retailer, there are plenty of 40-50 inch options. There are also 30 inch Samsung TVs if you don't mind a lower resolution.

I think it's assuming too much to assume that everybody has a $500-$1000 budget and gets the biggest thing they can afford. Some people don't have that budget, and some people who have the money still happily take the savings now that prices are down from a decade ago. And some people don't get a new device until the old one breaks.

I think an educated person should be aware of Jevon's paradox, but it's overused and abused because people cite it dogmatically to short circuit thinking or fact gathering. Risk homeostasis is another similar idea - there's something to it, but it's harmful to reasoned thinking when people go around assuming it applies 100% without checking.

The 60" CRT typically required 45-65" of space front to back. That's a lot of room to give up.

The 60" LCD panel takes up 3-8" front to back, which is dwarfed by the cable box, disc player, gaming system...

And therefore more people have >=1 of the LCD, which is exactly the point…

Likewise, people used to have one TV. Now, a significant majority have multiple. Not because they’re more energy efficient but the effect is the same.

The original point was about energy efficiencies though. This was the point people were disagreeing with.

Also for what it's worth, back in the early-to-mid 90s I actually did do a study on the number of TVs in an average household in my home town (it was for a college assignment). While my sample size was relatively small (ie only a few hundred people interviewed), I did discover the vast majority of homes had 2 TVs instead of 1 (which surprised me as I didn't live in a particularly affluent area). So I don't think it's quite true to even say most people used to only have 1 TV. Or at least that wasn't the trend observed by my study.

The original point was the Jevin paradox, which says that increased efficiency leads to more efficient consumption. We’re now going round in circles about the causes of the decline of CRTs relative to flat panels, which is definitely a divergence.

I suspect if you re-ran the study you’d get a number bigger than 2, which (qualitatively) is the point I was getting at!

The think the thing about the Jevin paradox (if I understand it correctly) is it requires causation and, as I've said previously, I think in the case of TVs it's a correlation without causation. ie I think we would still have seen larger displays and more TVs in each home even if there hadn't been improvements in energy efficiency. I appreciate you feel we're going round in circles but that's always been the crux of my point right from the start and the reason why I don't believe the Jevin Paradox applies to that specific example.

However I do also think we've headed into the realm of using assumptions as statistics (as also discussed in my other post[1]) so perhaps this is one of those occasions where our differing opinions cannot be consolidated?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192773

Also there has to be a somewhat high and tractable initial cost for the paradox to kick in. How much does it cost to run a TV for a year? I have no idea as it is rolled into my monthly electricity bill.

Now for a car I can see that immediately. Whoa $60 for a tank of gas? Maybe I won’t go on that road trip or maybe I’ll use the bus or telecommute.

There’s an important distinction here. This is an efficiency which decrease power consumption of idle an itself useless ”activity” which is a side effect everybody is trying to avoid, compare that to coal burners that really care about generating energy cheap.

But raising prices on electricity would spur demand for improved energy efficiency. Consumers are notoriously short-sighted on things that don't impact them directly and immediately.

We Americans used to love our V8 engines in our big, boaty cars. Then we had an energy crisis and gas prices rocketed up. For a while, people bought more fuel efficient small cars with 6- or 4-cylinder engines. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying trucks. Then gas prices went up again and small cars became popular again. Then gas prices dropped and people started buying SUVs/crossovers... see a pattern forming?

I know the following is an unpopular view in the US, but I believe this is where regulation comes into play.

Businesses will take shortcuts to save money because saving money is pure profit. And consumers will generally put their own financial needs above the concerns of the wider planet - because "what difference does one person make?" (a point I often read / hear). So the only alternative is to set mandatory guidelines for which products have to adhere to. Sure that will make products more expensive in the short term (R&D costs) but those prices will come down in the mid to long term and you end up with cheaper hardware to run (than if you just put electricity prices up) plus less energy consumption per device. It's a win-win.

But as I said, this is more of a European opinion than a US one - who tends to favour a lack of corporate regulation.

However I think ultimately there isn't a "correct" approach, just different opinions on the least disruptive.

Regulation another tool in the toolbox, but I don't think it should be the default tool to apply in many cases. It is pretty much the last resort: the market has failed (for any number of reasons) and there are no (dis)incentives that can be applied to alter the situation... so now the government needs to step in and tell the market what to do. This is not without risk as governments often screw this up whether intentionally due to lobbying/other interests or unintentionally as a result of just not understanding how to get the desired outcome. Then there's the reality that regulations tend to take on a life of their own as the regulators build their power bases on top of them.

On the other hand, with anything that consumes energy (whether electric, petroleum, or other), there is a lot of opportunity to influence behavior as there's both an up-front capital cost and an ongoing operational cost involved. Usually, the purchaser is paying directly for the operational cost. As a result, there's a direct path from the price of the consumable to the user of it. In these cases, incentivizing via the pocketbook can work quite well. And if that turns out to not be enough, more incentives can be added on the front-end via credits/taxes on the new/old thing to help shrink the price delta between them. So there's quite a bit that can be done before you get to the point of regulating. It also has the advantage of being easier to fine-tune than regulation.

While the market kicks into gear many people may lose lives or their livelihood. Capitalism doesn't work instantly.

You're absolutely right and it does take time. Unfortunately, when dealing with macro-level issues like this, putting in place long-term incentives and disincentives in the form of fines/taxes/etc. has been shown to work far better than just encouraging people to 'do the right thing.'

You can increase prices slowly, or announce that you will increases prices in fife years. I find it quite unlikely that people's life will collapse when you increase energy prices by five percent a year or so.

Please try and live in a developing country. 5% is huge for a family that can't make ends meet. I don't want to generalize but utopian ideas seem to be propped up on HN without counting billions of other people and their circumstances.

Luckily we can get 80% of the way to our carbon goals by completely ignoring developing countries and fixing things in the rich countries.

Historically, many more seem to lose their lives in directed economies.

No one is proposing central planning here. Just normal methods of nudging the market out of destructive behaviours.

That's the same argument against making petrol more expensive - because there are people who need it so making it more expensive is somehow unfair to them.

Absolutely disagree here - if petrol was vastly more expensive, alternative technologies would have to come down in price and be more popular, so yes, even the poorer people could eventually afford them. By keeping the price as low as it is(and living in the UK it's hugely expensive compared to US and many EU countries) we're allowing huge pollution of the environment for the sake of affordability. Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again? They are still allowed in many places across the EU for that exact reason - because forcing people to switch to natural gas/electricity/ecopellets would punish the less fortunate people. But the "less fortunate" people are going to be fucked the most if we don't work on the pollution, which is sort of impossible if we're stopping the fight because of them in the first place.

That's not really an equivalent example because there isn't an alternative to electricity where as there is an alternative to driving petrol powered vehicles (electric vehicles, public transport, car share, bicycle, walk, etc).

I also don't appreciate your "Maybe by that logic we should allow coal-fired boilers again?" comment when I was very clear in my post - the one you're directly replying to - that we should be focusing on greener forms of electricity creation and energy consumption. If that does also drive up electricity prices then so be it. However artificially increasing electricity prices and expecting the market to do the honourable thing seems like you're trying to solve the problem by changing the end variable rather than fixing the root cause itself and letting market prices adjust accordingly.

Generally it’s more efficient to help the poor by giving them money, not by distorting prices. Prices are information guiding a giant distributed system; you don’t lie to your OS kernel and expect your programs to run as well.

Making energy prices include externalities would encourage the improvements you listed.

Except raising prices is the only thing that has the desired outcome. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume... great now I can afford to run 2 for the same price.

I cannot see that happening on the consumer side of things because consumers have generally* not looked at power consumption as a factor for which hardware to buy nor how many to run.

* "generally" because home servers / media centres / etc are often picked for their power consumption. As are mining servers (eg crypto-currency). But these are by far the exception rather than the norm in terms of consumer devices.

It only matters if energy consumption is large compared to cost of the device or otherwise total cost of ownership. If PCs use only half the wattage that they used to consume, then it doesn't meaningfully change how many computers (or how powerful single computer) I can afford, because paying for the computers themselves dwarfs the payment for running them.

Yes and no. Policymakers too rarely do anything to show they care about distributional impacts, but you could certainly arrange things so as to fix this.

Why not impose a tax that doubles the cost of energy, and use all of the proceeds to fund universal basic income? That would both help poorer people and reduce energy usage.

Well, the same is true of every price level change, especially in food and housing. I'm sympathetic to the "fuel poverty" arguments, but fuel and energy subsidies are a pretty bad way of addressing the problem. Especially in non-Western countries.

Maybe we need progressive pricing?

Progressive pricing of goods/commodities tied to CO2 emissions as a result of their production/consumption would be good. Transportation, energy, industry, and agriculture account for the majority of US greenhouse gas emission.

Charging heavy consumers at a progressively higher rate will ensure the heaviest emitters pay their share without disproportionally affecting low income or light emitters.

Unfortunately that's no longer possible in the united states due to citizens united.

Your argument makes no sense because it is self defeating. The point of increasing the price of electricity is to increase the incentive to use less of it.

How would we use less of it? Precisely by actions such as development time spent on tasks to reduce energy usage.. such as improving the CPU idle states (among many, many other such options).

The increased cost makes it more impactful for the companies, even if they don't care about the enviroment. So they actually might pay the engineers to do something about it.

What i'm getting here is that you think the author should stop working on this research, because if he doesn't then maybe companies will start funding him so he can...do this exact research? Science shouldn't grind to a halt just because not doing it might increase funding.

No, more of the opposite. Companies should support him and others researchers because it's in their own interest.

I don’t see how that’s self defeating. But I understood the comment to be “if electricity cost more, people and companies would be more diligent in turning off lights when they aren’t needed, setting the thermostat to use less electricity, and doing other simple things to save electricity and money.” It wasn’t a question of whether the kernel can do a good job automatically, but whether there is low hanging fruit that we’re currently ignoring.

I don't want to sound complacent, but I don't see that 2% is necessarily a bad sign. I suspect that 2% of the power-consumption is integral to well over 2% of the economy, for instance. Improving energy efficiency is always good, of course, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that people need to be economically incentivised to implement.

That said, there are projects like Erlang on Xen [0] (a bare-metal-ish system) which enable unusual deployment patterns like spinning up a VM only after a request has been received, which could, presumably, make radically more efficient use of virtualised platforms. Not sure if anyone's done this in anger though.

Edit: I suppose higher prices would lead more people to do simple things like configuring their test servers to shutdown overnight and on weekends, mind

[0] http://erlangonxen.org/ , also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5431392

Energy demand is not elastic so raising prices is not the right way to reduce demand. Raising prices for inelastic commodities does not change the behavior of the consumer.

Why do you think it is not elastic?

Because it is a basic need of today's society. You can't suddenly decide you won't use energy without significant side-effects. It's worse if someone else decides that for you by raising prices.

Dunno, you can go without, shift timing, or buy more efficient devices.

How do you envision that actually helping in this case?

You sound like a California politician