Makes me wonder if I should unplug more stuff when on vacation.
Fuckin nutty how much juice those things tear through.
What's the margin on unplugging vs just powering off?
The EU (and maybe China?) have been regulating standby power consumption, so most of my appliances either have a physical off switch (usually as the only switch) or should have very low standby power draw.
I don't have the equipment to measure this myself.
Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners.
Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.
That said, I'm of the opinion that power/water/internet should all be state/county/city ran. I don't want my utilities companies to have profit motives.
My water company just got bought up by a huge water company conglomerate and, you guessed it, immediate rate increases.
If your local regulators approved the merger and higher rates, your complaint is with them as much as the utility company.
Not saying that some regulators are not basically rubber stamps or even corrupt.
I did (as did others), in fact, write in comments and complaints about the rate increases and buyout. That went unheard.
https://core.coop/my-cooperative/rates-and-regulations/rate-...
$50/month for 100W continuous usage isn't totally mad, and that could climb even higher over the rest of the decade.
Still only $50/month, not $150, but I very much care about 100W loads doing no work.
That said, I am not sure those numbers are true. I am in California (PG&E with East Bay community generation), and my TOU rates are much lower than those.
Minimum Delivery Charge (what’s paid monthly, which is largely irrelevant, before annual true-up of NEM charges): $11.69/month
Actual charges, billed annually, per kWh:
Peak NEM charge: $.62277
Off-Peak NEM charges: $.31026
Those rates do get a little lower in the winter (.30 to .48), and of course the very high rates benefit me when I generate more energy than I consume (which only happens when I’m on vacation). But the marginal all-in costs are just very high.
That’s NEM2 + TOU-EV2A, specifically.
I can solve for them with three equations for three unknowns... but since they change the rates quarterly by the time I know what my exact rates were they have changed.
https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-system-x3650-m5-workhors...
Also $150 for 100w is crazy, thats like $1.70 per kWh; it would cost about $150 a year at the (high) rates of southern Sweden.
Personally it’s cheaper to buy the hardware that does spend most of its time idling. Fast turnaround on very large private datasets being key.
In this case that 'new' is energy efficient software down to the individual lines of code and what their energy cost is on certain hardware. Academics are publishing about it in niche corners of the web and some entrepreneurs are doing it but of course none of this is cool now so we remain a mockery for our objectives. In time this too will become a real thing as many now are just beginning to feel the ever rising costs of energy which is only just starting to increase from decisions made years ago. The worst is yet to come as seen and heard directly from every single expert that has testified in the last years before the Energy and Commerce committee however only the outside-the-boxers among us watch such educational content to better prepare for tomorrow.
Electricity powers our world and nearly all take it for granted, time too will change this thinking.
:D