Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

It highly depends on what devices you have.

With recent Danish prices fluctuating between €0.5 and €1 per kWh, i have been going through my devices, and there were a few of them that surprised me.

I have a couple of Sonos speakers, and apparently every Sonos speaker draws 3-6W while idle/standby (https://support.sonos.com/s/article/256?language=en_US). Having 4 speakers means about 20W idle power consumption, which amounts to 175 kWh/year (14.5 kWh/month), and even at €0.5/kWh, that's €7 per month just keeping speakers on standby.

Another "hidden source" of power draw is a PlayStation. While it's fairly cheap keeping it on "standby" (6-8W), streaming media from it takes about 90W. For comparison an Apple TV uses between 3 and 7W (https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/appletv/Apple...) for the same.

Hue lightbulbs use about 0.5W in their powered off state. So 10 of those is another 87 kWh per year in idle consumption alone.

€1 per kWh? Is that a typo?

Sadly no.

Normal prices are around €0.35/kWh, but since the Danish electricity grid is based on renewables, with backup power being generated mainly by natural gas, that means when natural gas prices go up, so does electricity prices.

Combined with freak occurences of low rainfall in Sweden and Norway during 2021, meaning less hydroelectric power, as well as an unusual period of very little wind along the Danish west coast in august/september, meant that most of the winter has been using a lot more "backup power" than usual.

Solar is of course an option, but considering that the southern parts of Scandinavia is about as high up north as Canada, the sun usually doesn't shine when we need it (the sun rises around 9:00am and sets around 4pm during winter, with an impressive 19 hours of sunshine during all of December)

As i'm typing this, 57% of our power is being generated by renewables, and the current price is €0.46/kWh. The highest price in April has been €0.63/kWh, but on March 23rd it was €0,71/kWh, on March 14th €0.79/kWh, on March 9th it was €1.00/kwH, and on March 8th it was €1.12/kWh. It was even higher in february.

All of the above prices are "hourly spot prices" from 18:00 - 19:00, so the average 24 hour price will be lower, usually around the €0.5/kWh mark, though in february that was closer to €0.7/kWh.

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