I assume you live in a country where electricity is still cheap. This is not universally true.
At that level you're really in the territory where people will trip breakers in their home. This is "you have to hire an electrician and rewire part of your house" level of power consumption, which doesn't seem sustainable? Or at least "don't turn the stove on at the same time", which seems like an awfully disruptive way to ask people to live.
Heck, at that level for homes/cities with older electric service at lower amperages, the computer is now a significant fraction of the total service capacity of your connection to the city grid.
What's the response then? "Sorry you're not living in a new build home, forget about gaming"?
For me the wall-power isn't a huge issue but now you have to think about air conditioning. 1-2KW dissipating in a closed room heats the room up fast. This is already a problem with the RTX 2000-series that I'm running now and it seems like it'll be even worse.
"Glad you want to game, now please evaluate your home's electrical and HVAC systems to ensure they are compatible with a giant box pumping 2KW of power and converting it directly to heat"
While reading this I felt a tinge of nostalgia for back when I had to ask my mother to stay off of the phone while I was online.
It is kind of mind boggling how this can happen for a country with almost infinite supply of hydro power, but here we are.
Of course, Norway being Norway, since the start of September we now get a 90% refund for everything above 0.7NOK (based on the average price of each 24 hours) so for most of us will survive.
Oh, and since most power plants are owned by the public this doesn't affect budgets as badly as it could have done.
(It is even more complicated but I don't have more time now. Someone please fill in if I got something really wrong. Also, yes, this is a wild tangent but thinking I know HN I guess it will the day a little less boring for someone : )
That’s not true, my contract is for 0.41 (EUR, but that’s kinda the same right now) and I’ve seen far higher prices. Unless you are talking wholesale, which might be true but is useless for a consumer comparison.
In California with PGE we pay $0.49/Kwh on peak if you're using above "baseline"
https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
Our power bill for a <2000sqft single-family home is about $800 per month right now, and CA + PGE keep trying to do things like this to prevent solar from being worth it: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2022/08/cpuc-proposed-...