US States Banning Gaming PCs? Here's What's Going On
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The regulations seem reasonable. They are limited to regulating the amount of power used while desktop systems are at idle, not while "in use". They take into account the potential for accessories to be added by the end user, the "Expandability Score". This means "bigger" computers can consume more power at idle. The CEC defines 4 idle states; short-idle, long-idle, sleep and off. Each state is well defined -
* Short Idle is system in S0 state, display on, no applications loaded or running, after a fresh re-boot.
* Long Idle is the same as Short Idle except the screen is off.
* Sleep is Power State S3 (or equivalent if the system doesn't directly implement S3).
The regulations also specify the required default timeouts for transitioning between idle states, e.g. the screen should be turned off after 10 minutes without user input, it should enter S3 after 15, etc. These don't apply if the system ships without an OS installed, they explicitly say that an end-user is free to change the defaults.
You charge people a lot of money for electricity, and then this motivates them to learn it. A lot of 'byzantine' things are routine. A lot of the rituals we do with computers today would seem incredibly bizarre, and difficult to a person from 200 years ago. For example, on PCs, I hit the 'return' key to make a new line. Or on most computers, Cmd/Ctrl-V is often used to paste things. What does the letter V have to do with pasting anything? It's completely arbitrary and byzantine and the knowledge is frankly rarely mentioned and it's unclear to me how anyone learns it other than by mentorship. And yet, the entire population is more than happy to engage.
I challenge you to understand that, while this may seem reasonable to you, is not how humans operate. Especially in a household of multiple humans over which you have little/no direct control over, and multiple changes within a given month (the typical billing period for electricity). If you, your partner, your son, and your daughter have all gotten new, power hungry devices, and it's now also winter/snowing outside/aka the bill is expected to be high due to seasonal heating costs, and the a new, punitive rate plan has been put into effect, how could a non-technical consumer even start to address the change in electrical cost? Other than pay the now-exorbitant bill.
Regulations are the answer for the real world where people live. We can debate what the regulations themselves should say, but expecting human nature to suddenly change and that everyone should want to get an EE degree in their free time, just because their electricity bill is mysteriously higher, is not how I would approach trying to effect large sweeping cultural changes. Not when we can't even get a quorum of people vaccinated.
Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.
They're broken via legislation, not any fundamental part of the product.
The biggest problem with libertarian solutions is that they're regressive taxes, politically presented as "freedom".
"Letting the market decide" is not a form of regulation.
The main goal of libertarians is to get prices to work. The alternative that i fear we are heading towards is price controls then mandated requirements for output. E.g produce 100 loafs of bread today that will sell for $1.00 or off to jail you go.
> raise taxes on electricity and the free market will sort it out.
https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revi...
Some kind of cap and trade system would allow us to specify exactly how much emissions we are OK with each year, and let's people who want to emit more do so if they pay for it.
It is not the end consumer running consumer grade PCs who is killing the planet. How much energy, toxic byproducts, and external third party impacts are being produced to make any electronics?
Micro$oft preeches about the planet, yet just made so much hardware obsolete with the Draconian Win11 plan.
List goes on and on..
Should you be able to blast music at high volume outdoors if you pay a nuisance tax? If your wood burning stove heater makes the nearby aqi shoot up, is that ok if you pay for someone else to upgrade to a efficient furnace?
What about embedded manufacturing energy? Should the government not only tax CO2 within it's borders but also somehow audit CO2 for the entire supply chain? If not, some nation will make the call that fossil fuel burning is an externality that they can avoid paying.
Let's also admit that none of us can build an computer or a car from raw materials. Even if you would pay a premium for an efficient machine, most consumers don't understand what the future energy costs to them are going to be, will not demand efficiency, and thus suppliers will not build it. Apartments are rarely well insulated because the renters are rarely willing to pay more in rent to save more on energy costs.
As much as we'd like everyone to make rational decisions about complex transactions, most people will not. Im not arguing for stupidity even. At the level of the individual, the savings available by analyzing the options are smaller than the cost of the analysis. Its not worth much of my research time save $1 / yr in extra power efficiency. But across an industry it is.
So, only people with money get to make their own decisions? Poor people have no self-determination? Why is that?
For example, the Dodge Journey was not available in California in 2020 due to emissions regulations. This is objectively worse for poor people, since it gives them fewer options.
If taxing negative externalities causes significant cost to people who can't afford it, I'm all for subsidizing some amount of that though.
Therefore instituting the tax will lead to an immediate boost to those who already use less electricity, like poor people. But everyone has the same incentive for using less.
> Systems used for computer gaming in California consumed 4.1 terawatt-hours/year in 2016 or $700 million in energy bills, with emissions of 1.5 million tons carbon dioxide-equivalent allocated 66 percent to consoles, 31 percent to desktop personal computers, 3 percent to laptops, and less than 1 percent to emerging media streaming devices.
[0] https://www.energy.ca.gov/publications/2019/plug-loads-game-...
I'm thinking older houses heated with natural gas but where electricity is mostly supplied by renewables. In this case, it's better to heat less and have the PC act as a heater, that performs computations as a side effect!
If every single person in the US ran a computer consuming 100W on idle for an entire year, that would add up to around 300 terawatt hours, or about one tenth of the US' electricity consumption that year.
The EU regulated refrigerator power use decades ago.
https://www.beko.co.uk/tall-larder-fridge-lsp3671d-black-sil...
But regardless I agree these regulations are a good thing. These computers should be shipped in a low power configuration.
"Sleeping" is not the same as idle.
> Computers sleeping with 11.5w of power draw are banned (100kw/y depending on configuration), not 100w. That is more or less pushing a high end graphics card for 20 minutes. So a drop in the bucket for a workstation or gaming pc.
Even assuming those units are watt hours, I have no idea where you're going with this. Specifically the second sentence. What is a drop in the bucket for a workstation or gaming pc? Is what the power draw during sleep compared to total power draw, or are you comparing some of the other quantities you brought up?
> But regardless I agree these regulations are a good thing.
That's not what I was trying to say or did say. My post was supposed to give people an idea of the general magnitude we're dealing with.