If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else.
I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity.
If you use a 400 watt computer all of the time your personal remaining energy budget is 1600 watts. I use a computer around 10 hours a day during the week, and three or four on weekend days (so around a third of the time). Amortized, that means I would be using on average around 133 watts on computing, if I used such a desktop. But I actually use a Thinkpad T420, and its consumption averages out to around 30 watts when in use (so amortized to 10 watts).
Second, the Macbook Pro which i use 8 hours a day has a 140W power supply but I'm sure it uses less than 50W on average.
- 50W * 8h = 0,4kWh
- 2kW * 24h = 48kWh.
The laptop isn't going to be the problem! Heating OTOH uses lots of energy so good insulation is the key.
Power is a flow, it's the rate of energy usage (or output) over time. More power means higher top speed, or stronger acceleration, or hill-climbing ability, or towing capacity.
Energy is a stock, it's a total quantity of potential. A bigger fuel tank won't make your car any faster, but it will determine how much range you have.
Since appliances, equipment, generators, etc., consume or produce watts of power, it's handy to consider how much energy this represents by simply multiplying watts by time, by default, hours.
Also a high end desktop computer might pull 400 W from the wall while gaming, but that's not something the average person does 8 hours a day. Light work on a desktop computer with a monitor should be around 80 W on average.
Well, first of all, the 400w is a limit, not a _target_. A computer with a 400w power supply does not generally run at 400w. If it did, you'd notice it; that's not an insignificant amount of heat.
However, more importantly, you've misread the article significantly:
> which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day)
> Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh
So well within budget, then.
First 400W is peak not average.
Second Wh isn't W. 400W is 400/2000ths of 2000W
Third 500mW can provide a reasonable amount of compute for most tasks as evidenced by my 2 yo phone being a perfectly usable desktop when plugged into a monitor. The 10W to run peripherals vastly exceeds the compute needs and is mostly in the form of light being absorbed by an lcd. Before that I had a 6yo laptop that used around 3-10W including screen. Phone hardware is perfectly capable of gaming, local document editing, compiling, and even running small scientific workloads.
Fourth you're completely ignoring embodied energy, transport and climate control which are the things that actually matter.
Fifth. You can do things that aren't sit at a computer.
Sixth. A high power desktop isn't that common even amongst people who play new AAA games a lot.
Seventh. The attitude of 'we can't possibly deviate even miniscully from having everyone on earth follow my exact lifestyle (even the 90% of people who have no access to it) right down to one particularly wasteful aspect of it that has only been around for fifteen years in its current most wasteful form' is unfathomably small minded and entitled.
In the case of power supplies, both total capacity and durability are indicated by the power rating. I don't know what current thinking is, but recall when overspeccing the power supply was often recommended for reliability and cooling considerations.
I have an anecdote: many years ago when Bitcoin/altcoin mining on GPUs was still feasible I ran a rig with a 335 watt TDP graphics card, and the whole setup measured 360-something watts at the wall outlet. It ran 24/7 for months on a 400 watt PSU, without problems.
The average person doesn't have a desktop, let alone a 400w one, it's all phones and laptops these days
On the plus side, i learned how to install and debug Cuda.