I agree - it's overdue for someone numerate to analyze the options. I've downloaded the book and will read it this weekend. It's always astonished me that most mainstream journalists focus on stuff like not leaving your TV on standby, but never suggest turning the heating down a bit (or turning the A/C off for any of you lucky enough to live somewhere warmer than where I live)
I'd imagine it's because anyone who's paid a gas or electric bill in both summer and winter for the same dwelling knows how much heating and A/C cost. Thus, individual expenditure of comfort-related energy depends not on awareness but on willingness; and a TV news item certainly isn't going to make me turn off the A/C at night and wake up every morning with sweat-soaked sheets and a parched throat.
Devices that drain power while doing nothing useful, on the other hand, are an awareness problem. If a news platform can inform people of small power drains that are avoidable at nearly nil personal cost, the aggregate effect could easily be greater than a moral harangue about the social inequity of refrigerated food.
a TV on standby can actually use 40W of power. This is really an issue of product design that we should be demanding the manufacturers fix. While 40W may be small compared with the bigger picture, it is still energy that is completely wasted, and if you add up the savings from everyone in USA turning the TV off all the way, the energy adds up, and Americans just got a lot more exercise from getting up from the couch and walking to the TV.
Phone chargers and many other electronic devices are using less than 1W when unused but plugged in. Again, this is an issue that should be solved with better product design.
>While 40W may be small compared with the bigger picture, it is still energy that is completely wasted
The bigger picture is all that ever matters when we're discussing fungible goods such as power. The concept of an "order of magnitude" is fundamental to engineering discussions. 40W is just not significant when talking about the power consumption of an average American. Because of this, when you multiply 40W times the number of Americans and compare it to the total power used by all Americans, it is still insignificant on the important scale. It does not matter that if we all unplugged our TV sets when we're not watching them that we'd save enough electricity to power 10k households, because 10k households is insignificant when compared to the number of households in America.
>and Americans just got a lot more exercise from getting up from the couch and walking to the TV.
No, they didn't. A lot of Americans just got a tiny bit of exercise each. They're still all fat and out of shape (1). You're playing with the third decimal place here, or worse.
>Again, this is an issue that should be solved with better product design.
Due attention to the concept of orders of magnitude directs us to work on the things that matter, not the things that are marginal. This helps us overcome the all-too-natural urge to moralize over every trivial action. In point of fact, this issue _should_not_ be solved with better product design if that effort is better spent on things that really matter. If you could decrease power transmission losses by 50% over high tension lines, for example, you'd swamp the contribution of eliminating appliance standby power consumption many times over (I would guess).
Finally, this principle effects every aspect of one's life and is probably a very good indicator of the kind of person who would succeed in a startup environment. If the "We Must Do Everything We Can" principle invades you or your startup, you will be doomed to failure. You will not have a reliable way to sort out the important from the unimportant, the central from the peripheral, nor the vital from the irrelevant. You cannot afford to be fiddle-f@#king with trivial layout issues when you really need to be getting a product out the door, for example.
(1)This is just a bit of rhetorical license. Not all Americans are fat, nor out of shape.
These small savings do matter, because they are low hanging fruit.
Convincing people to turn a television off all the way (or better yet, making it automatic) has no downside with respect to quality of life. Not taking a bath on the other hand certainly affects the quality of life of those around you.
Being able to turn off one entire power station because soft standby has been disabled is a small step, but as the cost is insignificant why do you care that the step is only small?
One thing you see from incrimental programming is that waiting for the 'final answer' doesn't work, but a large number of small steps does. It's the same in all things.
Exactly. There are few places where we can get free energy. Making TVs more energy efficient is one of them, so we may as well do it since it is such an easy task.
If you do the math (40W * 24h * 365 * .09 $/kWh)
You end up with a savings of $30 a year
At 5 seconds to turn off the TV properly you are at $60/hour. Most people would think this is a good rate for their work.
Maybe if I try and generalize this to something that it doesn't really apply to by using abstract principles with no math behind them I can get more up votes...
