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LED and CFL lights, SEER ratings, LEED certifications, Energy Stars all are having an impact. Just in computers there have been huge advances. My MacBook Pro r

• jacquesm 10y ago
  > My MacBook Pro requires about 1/6 the electricity of my 2007 Desktop Apples to Oranges though (or Apples, but still). The comparison should be a laptop from 2007. I ran a house on solar electricity and windpower back then, my laptop was about 35 Watts according to the e-meter connected to it, my present day laptop is roughly the same. Laptops have always been substantially more efficient than desktops.
  • DiabloD3 10y ago
    I used to have the same argument... until I realized modern laptops can be desktop replacements (without being those gigantic bricktop "mobile/portable workstations"). Just slap a full sized monitor and a keyboard+mouse, and its more capable as a thin desktop (ala iMac) than the actual thing, and when you want to leave, just unplug all that shit and leave. The only call for full sized desktops is people like me, where cramming in full sized GPUs, more than one drive, and 32+GB of RAM is required.
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      > The only call for full sized desktops is people like me, where cramming in full sized GPUs, more than one drive, and 32+GB of RAM is required. That's exactly why I'm still stuck on a desktop.
      • Cerium 10y ago
        Stuck? I love my desktop. When I am not at my desk I use remote desktop to access my desktop.
    • outworlder 10y ago
      > The only call for full sized desktops is people like me, where cramming in full sized GPUs, more than one drive, and 32+GB of RAM is required. That, or when you need more CPU horsepower than what a laptop will provide. Even if it is not thermal throttled, if it is not a big laptop, odds are it is using a very low power part.
      • posguy 10y ago
        Definitely, heat dissipation and power envelope limitations on laptops are still a major issue, but with power gating coming standard on most chips and very aggressive p states, average power usage is down by double digit margins on your average CPU over the last decade. This is very beneficial for servers and workstations too, as it keeps your power bill much lower, and makes it not financially viable to stick around on 8+ year old hardware, where it draws 250 watts for half the performance of a year or two old system, that will pull 60 watts minimum, and while topping out at 250 watts, will like average around 70 watts or so, saving you about $180 a year at $0.12/kwh. Edit: Missed a zero, reworded last sentence.
    • douche 10y ago
      They don't make true mac desktop replacements anymore. My gf has an old, old, 17" MacBook. There are no equivalents for a modern upgrade.
      • Scoundreller 10y ago
        and $$$ for reasonable resolution, let alone dpi.
      • noir_lord 10y ago
        I have a Vostro 3750 I don't want to replace as it has a 17" screen (though only 1600x900) and a full sized keyboard (with numpad). If they gave me a modern version at 3200x1800 with a decent i5 I'd be buying another.
      • jonnathanson 10y ago
        I have a 2007 17" MBP, fully loaded for its time, that was still giving me great service as a classic gaming machine (via Bootcamp) as recently as six months ago. In its prime it was essentially a true desktop replacement for most work activity. Sadly, it's about ready to give up the ghost. There are fewer and fewer use cases I can justify squeezing out of it these days. But what a hell of a decade it's given me.
  • outworlder 10y ago
    True, however desktops are getting more efficient, too. You can have an impressive amount of computing power (GPU and CPU) with a couple hundred watts. Just a couple of years ago I had a 800w PSU to be able to run modern games. Now I have a mini-ITX machine with a 450w power supply with a lot of room to grow. I'd estimate actual power usage to be 50-60% the nominal capacity at peak. It's hard to compete with a laptop in power consumption, of course. My CPU's TDP is higher than 35w. It's an I3, so Intel says 51W TDP. It will still run circles around the laptop's cpu.
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      The big competitor really is AWS, especially with their multi-gpu instances. For gamers not really an option to have their GPUs at the end of a wire but for a lot of other applications it makes good sense.
    • fnj 10y ago
      > desktops are getting more efficient, too. You can have an impressive amount of computing power (GPU and CPU) with a couple hundred watts. Jeeze, my desktop, a full socket 1150 Core i3, is under 100 watts. Heck, I have a file server with twelve 3.5" hard drives and a 4 core socket 1150 Xeon that draws under 200 watts with everything spinning.
      • kbart 10y ago
        Powerful GPU alone can draw 200-300 W of power.
  • djrogers 10y ago
    > Apples to Oranges though (or Apples, but still). The comparison should be a laptop from 2007 Nope, in 2007 a lot of people used and needed desktops that are more than satisfied by the available computing power on a laptop today. It's only an apples-oranges comparison if everyone were still using desktops, which is not the case.
    • seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      In 2007, even more people had their needs met by laptops. Heck, there were people in 2002 who went laptop full time. Anyone looking closely enough in 2000 could see the writing on the wall.
      • mbreese 10y ago
        I bought my last desktop in 1996. After that, I switched over to using a docked laptop as a replacement in 2000.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • caseysoftware 10y ago
    > Laptops have always been substantially more efficient than desktops. Yes but a decade+ ago, they weren't a replacement for a desktop, so you ended up having both. Now even mid end laptops (or "low end" Macs) are totally feasible as replacements. I bought my last desktop in 2010 and I can't imagine buying another one.
    • posguy 10y ago
      The power states and performance per watt have gone way up too, in 2007 power gating CPUs was not commonplace, and Intel was just starting to optimize for performance per watt (especially in the low power laptop/tablet market). What vendors have done is provide computers with the same power envelope, but much more performance so they may do your calculations @ 35 watts, and then immediately cut all power to large swaths of the CPU so as to curtail power use by at least a few watts, if not 10 watts (depends on your CPU).
    • icantdrive55 10y ago
      Panasonic S25-S607 did the job for me. It was big, but a great, well built computer. It lasted more than ten years too. It had screws. It was repairable. Plus, I did more with that computer than my constantly changing upgrading Macs. I am so tired of devices/programs not working; I am tempted to wipe my MacBook Pro clean, and only installing Linux.
    • noir_lord 10y ago
      > I bought my last desktop in 2010 and I can't imagine buying another one. I still do 95% of my development on a desktop, I just can't see ever not doing that, I'm older now and a good desk, good chair, 3 big screens takes up enough space that a tower isn't taking up much more space. That and I can put hardware into a PC for half the price of a Macbook Pro that will absolute annihilate the laptop on performance. Portability and power efficiency does impose a constraint. For me the trade off of having two machines is worth it rather than having one machine that is permanently hobbled by been designed for a use case I rarely use makes no sense.
      • NoGravitas 10y ago
  • kelnos 10y ago
    I permanently turned off my last desktop around 2007, and have been using a laptop exclusively since. I had a media PC I built under my TV, and I shut that off permanently around 2010, replacing it with a Google TV device that I later stopped using. Nowadays I have a laptop (no external monitor, even), a reasonably low-powered NAS, and a ChromeCast, and that covers my computing/media needs at home. In that time I also went from a CRT TV to a plasma, and at some point in the next year or so I'll probably swap that out for a (lower power) OLED TV or similar. (As an aside, 35W for a laptop today seems excessive. Assuming PowerTop is accurate, my laptop is using 9W right now. While charging it's undoubtedly using more, but even plugged in while fully charged, with less of the power-saving features enabled, 35W seems a bit high.)
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      > with less of the power-saving features enabled, 35W seems a bit high That's wall plug consumption, and a pretty beefy laptop, i7, high res screen, as much RAM as it will hold and a large (spinning) disk (Lenovo T540p). Even totally idle it is still around 20W.
  • Arizhel 10y ago
    >The comparison should be a laptop from 2007. >Laptops have always been substantially more efficient than desktops. No, they haven't; not on a MIPS/Watt basis. A laptop-to-desktop comparison is entirely valid. I use a laptop now, and a desktop in the past; I do the same work, and I get better performance out of my modern laptop. I even have dual 24" monitors on the laptop (docking station). Demanding a comparison between desktops of the mid-2000s and desktops of now is like demanding a comparison between the fuel consumption of a Corvette from the 1980s and one from now, instead of recognizing that I can buy an economy car now that gets better performance than the 1980s Corvette while also getting much better fuel economy. If you're comparing on the basis of performance and capability, you don't need to stay with the same class of device, because capabilities and performance have changed so much over time.
  • wutbrodo 10y ago
    > The comparison should be a laptop from 2007. Why? When we're talking about overall usage, functional replacements are far more relevant than direct device-category to device-category comparisons. In much the same way, the fact that my mom has replaced her desktop with a tablet is the directly relevant comparison for my mom's "electricity usage due to personal computing".
  • gaius 10y ago
    To put that 35W into perspective, my old SGI workstation has a 750W PSU...
  • hannob 10y ago
    > Apples to Oranges though (or Apples, but still). The comparison should be a laptop from 2007. I ran a house on solar electricity and windpower back then, my laptop was about 35 Watts according to the e-meter connected to it, my present day laptop is roughly the same. No, it shouldn't. Many people use laptops today for the things they used Desktops in the past.
  • fnj 10y ago
    > Laptops have always been substantially more efficient than desktops. Not when you compare like to like. You should be comparing those feeble laptops with NUCs.
• stock_toaster 10y ago
  Natural gas has also gotten quite cheap[1] in many places, and I wonder how much heating has transitioned from electrical to gas over the years. [1]: Not to mention tax coupons/incentives to replace appliances with more energy efficient ones, which often include gas options.
  • douche 10y ago
    Electrical heat is shite that you rip out at the first opportunity.
    • deelowe 10y ago
      Everyone was saying the opposite 10 years go.
    • tzs 10y ago
      Electric resistance heat, yes. Electric heat pump heating, though, is fine.
    • mikepurvis 10y ago
      One thing I like is that it's very targeted. I have a two stage gas furnace, but I also have a leaky, draughty old century home. At night during the winter, it's cheaper to use space heaters in the bedrooms and let the main floor fall to 12C.
      • Cerium 10y ago
        Whats funny is at least where I live it costs the same. Per Joule of energy delivered to my living space electricity is about 7x more expensive. When I use electric heat I can target and only heat about 1/7th of my house. Electric still feels more cozy though.
        • sitkack 10y ago
          After the apocalypse, the lucky will be wearing electric heated vests. Heater to skin contact is much more efficient than heating the air.
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > Transition to EVs may start to soak up all the gains we're making in efficiency so the usage may start to tick back up. I share this concern, but my current best guess is that while EVs will surge—it won't be instantaneous—and during that ramp not only will efficiency be increasing dramatically (in terms of sharing, routing, and better hardware) but we will be swapping commutes for VR, and moving to more walkable cities, such that if we do it right the net demand won't increase.
  • WorldMaker 10y ago
    Also, as others point out: the transition to EVs "fills in the bathtub" more than it adds "new" demand. In the course of a day, there is a huge demand for electricity during the day and especially the work day and it drops off somewhat sharply as people go to bed. This evening drop-off is sometimes referred to as the "bathtub" in energy demand curves because that's what it looks like in the graphs. (This is often reflected in the "off-peak" pricing and hours from various utilities.) The majority of EVs charge overnight already. A very rough napkin estimate I saw once showed that assuming the majority of charging continues to happen overnight in the bathtub, you could replace more than half of all cars on the road today with EVs and the electric grid wouldn't feel it from a capacity standpoint (ie, no new coal/nuclear/hydro plants needed). Throw in some of the proposed "smart grid" enhancements where the electric grid has some leeway to manage how EVs charge/discharge and things are even rosier. (These proposals include the idea of allowing the grid to balance overall demand by balancing EV demand more directly. This includes "pausing" EV chargers during demand spikes and even potentially "loaning" power back from the large batteries of EVs to meet those spikes, repaying that power when demand drops again.)
• pavement 10y ago
  LED bulbs cause problems. In outdoor lighting they are too bright, and over-illuminate at night, but people use them anyway. They just turn them on, walk away, and blast their surroundings with obnoxious, eye-gouging light bulbs. Especially construction crews, that install cheap temporary utility lights. Many people install them in places where the lights point away from them, and outward at their surroundings, such that they don't have to suffer the excessive brightness. It's like subjecting oncoming traffic to your car's extra bright high-beams, except it's the house across the street, and it never goes away. It's bad enough that vandalism is warranted. Outdoor LED lights are that bad.
  • brownbat 10y ago
    > In outdoor lighting they are too bright, and over-illuminate at night, but people use them anyway. I couldn't disagree more. Not only can you control the lumens to a much finer extent, as more cities retrofit to LEDs, you're seeing better illumination with less distortion and far lower light pollution. There are striking images[0,2] from the LA Bureau of Streetlighting[1] that have made the rounds at a lot of lighting shows to prove this point, after they conducted the world's largest LED retrofit. The Bureau got praise from the Dark Skies movement for reducing light pollution while increasing pedestrian safety and lowering energy costs.[1] You might find a few in Hollywood that are nostalgic for the hazy yellows of sodium, but most photographers are really struck by the improvement, "in nearly every case, better for cinematography."[2] EDIT - On second read, you seem to be referring to the specific case of neighbors who don't understand how many lumens they need. It is easier to crank them up on LEDs, that's true. But that's really a problem with people installing high-lumens for no reason. They could as well install incandescent spotlights and be equally noxious. LEDs in general have so many upsides, attacking them broadly seems like throwing the baby out to spite your face. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurelmoglen/2017/03/15/eben-bayer-harnessing-mushroom-power-to-eradicate-plastics/#2015ddee7eef https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurelmoglen/2017/03/15/eben-ba... [1] http://bsl.lacity.org/led.html http://bsl.lacity.org/led.html [2] http://nofilmschool.com/2014/02/why-hollywood-will-never-look-the-same-again-on-film-leds-in-la-ny http://nofilmschool.com/2014/02/why-hollywood-will-never-loo...
    • 10y ago
• flyinghamster 10y ago
  The first thing I noticed about the article was the complete non-mention of energy efficiency. In the span of a decade (maybe less?) LED lighting has made huge advances. Electric vehicles would certainly provide some growth potential, though overall they would most likely even out 24-hour usage patterns rather than overstressing the grid.
  • sandworm101 10y ago
    >> they would most likely even out 24-hour usage patterns rather than overstressing the grid. Take a look at exactly how much power goes into an electric vehicle. I once worked out how many solar panels one would need to charge a tesla once per day in my local. The math pointed to something like a solid acre of land dedicated to sustaining a single car. (not an acre of panels, at my latitude you need proportionally more land on which to mount panels). A shift to all-electric transport would produce a demand for which LEDs could never compensate. Only the very wealthy would ever own enough land to actually self-sustain through renewables. Cities will need power grids for a long while. Take electric transport out of the equation and things start looking much better. Hydrogen-powered vehicles would imho at least allow the possibility of "de-electrification" in north america.
    • nradov 10y ago
      Where do you think the hydrogen will come from? Electricity is still in the hydrogen production equation.
      • sandworm101 10y ago
        But you don't need the grid. Instead of pushing power around via wires you make the hydrogen near the power plant and push hydrogen around. That's the de-electrification, the lack of the extensive grid to move power between source and demand.
        • nradov 10y ago
          You've got to be kidding. Due to hydrogen embrittlement and fire risk from leaks there's no safe way to push hydrogen around in an underground pipeline network. The closest we can get is distributing natural gas and then converting that to hydrogen near the point of demand, which still requires a lot of electricity.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  It's a blip. As soon as everyone starts wearing VR headsets for office work the CPUs will be back cooking eggs again. And 4k gaming.
  • adventured 10y ago
    Zero chance everyone starts wearing VR headsets for office work. First, there will never be a need for the majority of routine office work to take place by wearing VR headsets (ie strapping smartphones to your eyeballs). Second, it would be very damaging to the eye health of employees to do so (for at least half the work day). The legal problems alone guarantees it can never happen. Long duration gaming is still a niche and always will be. The average person doesn't game hours per day and does not want to (because of the fundamental difference between passive and active entertainment). 5 to 10 hours per week is irrelevant in terms of increasing electrical demand due to 4K gaming.
    • noir_lord 10y ago
      > Zero chance everyone starts wearing VR headsets for office work I'd say unlikely not zero, the assumption that everyone is going to strap on an occulus for work is close to zero but if VR finally takes off the 4th or 5th generation systems will be smaller, lighter, cheaper and better that is just the way things seem to go. I'm old enough to remember when lugging a mobile around was seen as something that made you a bit of a twat because they where huge, clunky, only worked intermittent, expensive and had terrible range. Now I have a £200 quid phone from 3 years ago (Nexus 4) that is none of those things. I actually think the first thing we'll see in workplaces is the first none-sucky AR systems, there are a hell of a lot of use cases when you combine them with things like facial recognition. Receptionists, doctors, pretty much any role that deals with the public. If they could display decent high quality text and graphics they'd be excellent educational and maintenance tools, back when I worked as an electrician I would have loved to have been able to pull building wiring plans while working on things.
  • Dylan16807 10y ago
    The limits of air cooling are very effective at stopping CPUs and GPUs from growing in power use. And whatever VR office work might look like, it would probably not need a whole lot of processing compared to games.
• ghaff 10y ago
  My office used to be nice and cozy in the winter because of the heat thrown off by computers and CRTs. These days, it's really not that different from any other room in the house.