Vampire power

11/7/2011 6:13 PM EST

If everyone in the world drinks one cup of coffee heated by electricity that will consume about 500 GWh.

If everyone in USA had a cup it would be 40GWh.

When you're dealing with power it is easy to make huge numbers.

11/8/2011 10:01 AM EST

I love when people quote numbers :)

500GWh / 7bln people = 71Wh per person per day.

71Wh * 3600s = 255.6kJ

255600kJ / (4.18 J/gK * 90K) = 679g

Note: 4.18 J/gK - heat capacity of water.
90K - temperature difference to boil water.

So every person in the world (do kids drink coffee?) could boil 679 grams of water every day. You guys have BIG mugs there :)

BTW, I'm in the coffee business.

11/9/2011 4:08 AM EST

No offence PWong, but how do you know that the adapter uses 5W? How did you measure that?

11/10/2011 12:56 PM EST

I used a Watt-meter between the wall outlet and the adapter. The lamp has an On/Off switch just for a group of LEDs. Home-use watt-meter is not very accurate but it's consistent (measures V, I, watt, etc.). My library lends them for free to encourage energy saving.

11/11/2011 4:51 AM EST

Many of these cheap and cheerful meters will not measure real power (W) but apparent one (VA) that you should not be concerned of (you don't pay for that and power companies deal with it). All modern SMPS power supplies will have a large capacitor filter on the input that sucks quite few VAs and will trick the cheap meters - same goes for even small transformers in linear supplies.

A classic 5VA PCB transformer will have idle current of 15mA @ 230V that gives us 3.5VA but the real power that goes into heating the core (on idle) will be around 1W only.

If you want to make sure that your meter is cheap then connect a mains rated capacitor that will suck say 10VA and see what your meter is showing. The real power should be around 0W.

11/9/2011 9:22 AM EST

Realized a mistake. Energy consumption for A/C is 1000kWh/month and 30kWh/day, of course.

It make my point even stronger.

11/9/2011 3:42 PM EST

This makes my point exactly too. Far too much of these "green" moves are pointless. At least you are making your decisions from a well informed position. Most of the citizens are not capable of rational thought.

They think that by turning off their wall warts every night they are saving polar bears. Meantime turning down the A/C by one hundredth of a degree would have more effect.

They also think that they are saving the planet and being green shoppers by using paper bags or reusable bags instead of plastic. The truth is that 99.9% of the impact of a bag of groceries is inside the bag. And, to cap it all, paper bags use more resources than plastic.
The retail sector has done a very clever job to divert the consumer's attention away from the real resource hogs to an argument about bags - which have no effect.

1/19/2012 6:49 PM EST

here in UK, that would cost me the equivalent of 2300 dollars a year - and people complain if they are billed half that for all the other energy they use, never mind the A/C. A school here redesigned their A/C system with the help of an architect to get a system that was mostly driven by (free) air flow over the building - saving tens of thousands of pounds over the year. You might like to think about that. That's truly green, and very meaningful.

11/10/2011 12:37 PM EST

I worked at a research institute in the 1970's, and we had a couple of teams working on energy usage even then. One of them had a wonderful mantra: "Please! Save all the energy you can! More for me!". His point was that personal savings by making sacrifices was a drop in the bucket compared to what you could save by fixing a problem at the source -- making air conditioners .1% more efficient would save more power than everyone turning on and off power strips, for example. So low-power wall-wart chips are the RIGHT thing to do -- as are energy savings in large appliances. Anyplace there's a big multiplier, there's an opportunity...

11/10/2011 1:23 PM EST

Verizon FIOS DVR - turn on the TV when the box is supposedly off, and you'll see that it is displaying a pretty logo screen saver telling you to turn on the FIOS box or turn off the TV. By all means I expect the unit to wake up whenever a recording is scheduled, and maybe it needs to check in every half hour for listing updates, but there is no need for it to be on full power ALL THE TIME. If I explicitly turned it off, and the indicator light on the front is off, I don't expect a screen saver - I expect it to be in a low-power sleep mode like my computer which turns off the disks and display. This is lazy design to a lazy spec that doesn't think about power because it's always plugged in (and the designers aren't paying the bill). All of these computing systems should be designed with a "laptop" battery-powered attitude. And it's probably possible with a software change: lower the clock multiplier, focus on minimal realtime clocking for wakeup calls, and stop doing wasteful things.

11/10/2011 4:03 PM EST

Are you hooked up via HDMI? HDMI devices know when connected devices turn off and on (that is why turning on your DVD player automatically turns on your TV. Perhaps what is happening is when you turn on your TV the FIOS box partially wakes up and displays the screen saver.

11/10/2011 1:32 PM EST

Verizon Fios claims over 3.7 million customers. We have two cable boxes in two rooms, either of which could be asleep for more than 3/4 of the typical day. Just at one box per household, asleep for half of the day, there should be some worthwhile savings.

11/11/2011 3:55 PM EST

23W*3/4*24h = 414Wh/day
at $0.10/kWh it saves you 4 cents a day or $1.20 per month. It is not even funny.

11/11/2011 6:25 PM EST

Andrew: Not everyone gets power for as little as ten cents per kWh. In California, only our first dozen or so kWh/day are "baseline" and still they cost over $.13 each. If you are using as little as 24 kWh/day, then everything above that is in the 200%+ tier which costs over $.30/kWh.

With that in mind, consider that many people (like DutchUncle) have two or more cable boxes, and that millions of people in California pay over $.30/kWh for power. Now we're talking $7.20/month or more than $85/year in potential savings. Who's laughing now?

11/12/2011 10:16 AM EST

I could laugh, but actually I pity the people who already found out that statism and government control does not work, but still do not want to believe it. Unfortunately, realization of this simple fact may come too late for some.

Since you can't get cheap electricity, try to build new power plant. Having more of something available tend to lower price of the same something. Economists call it "The law of supply and demand"

But no,
"These neo-luddites have blocked nuclear power plant construction; they have vetoed the building of additional dams for hydroelectric power (lest some aquatic creepy crawlers be disturbed); and are nearly apoplectic in their opposition to coal- or natural gas-fired electric power plants."
https://www.mises.org/daily/592/Californias-Enemy-The-State

For more details on the history of California energy crisis see "How to Create an Energy Crisis"
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=361

http://mises.org/daily/1954

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In US we have plenty of resources of every imaginable kind. Coal for hundreds of years, offshore oil, shale gas, nuclear, etc. It is quite simple to have enough energy. All you need to do is stop creating problem for the companies producing energy and stop all subsidies and regulation for "renewable sources", "green house gases" and similar nonsense.

11/12/2011 6:24 PM EST

Way to go, California!
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Californians are also making a big contribution. Under a state law passed to encourage the construction of more solar projects, NRG will not have to pay property taxes to San Luis Obispo County on its solar panels, saving it an estimated $14 million a year.

Assisted by another state law, which mandates that California utilities buy 33 percent of their power from clean-energy sources by 2020, the project’s developers struck lucrative contracts with the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to buy the plant’s power for 25 years.

P.G.& E., and ultimately its electric customers, will pay NRG $150 to $180 a megawatt-hour, according to a person familiar with the project, who asked not to be identified because the price information was confidential. At the time the contract was awarded, that was about 50 percent more than the expected market cost of electricity in California from a newly built gas-powered plant, state officials said.

11/12/2011 10:26 AM EST

There is a standard solution. It is called competition in free market. Works every time it has been tried.

Once upon a time there were cities in US actually having multiple providers of electricity fiercely competing for the customers, lowering prices and improving services.
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Six electric light companies were organized in the one year of 1887 in New York City. Forty-five electric light enterprises had the legal right to operate in Chicago in 1907. Prior to 1895, Duluth, Minnesota, was served by five electric lighting companies, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, had four in 1906.