Comment by bee_rider
5 months ago
This seems unlikely to me. Most of these machines are laptops nowadays. While my Linux system idles at 4W, the plug is only capable of going up to 60W. So even if Windows brought it to the point of nearly overheating the power brick (I’m no Windows fan, but I’m pretty skeptical there!), it would only be 1/10’th of a typical 600W window air conditioner.
The untapped energy savings is, IMO, getting people to run their climate control less. We should toughen up a bit, tell our brains that 50F-80F is the comfortable range. (Depending on humidity and your workload).
For any individual the difference is not noticeable. But across the several hundred million laptops in the US even 1 watt adds up.
I compared to air conditioners though, which would also be multiplied by that several hundred million factor (well, maybe the laptops get an additional factor of, like, 4 because a room can fit multiple people with laptops, and you don’t need an air conditioner in every season).
If we’re looking at choices a person can make, every choice is multiplied by millions when applied to the entire population of a country, so the 1W differences are swamped by the equally scaled 10W differences.
Every watt into laptops means a watt the air conditioner needs to move out.
you cannot ignore small things in the grand scheme as they add up.
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