Cost of Powering Your PC
Posted on February 16, 2007 Comments (5)
The cost of leaving your PC on
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Here’s the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~160 watts: 160 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1401.6 kilowatt-hours
The other thing you’ll need to know is how much you’re paying for power in your area. Power here in California is rather expensive and calculated using a byzantine rate structure. According to this recent Mercury News article, the household average for our area is 14.28 cents per kilowatt-hour. 1401.6 kilowatt-hours * 14.28 cents / 100 = $200.15 So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.
Power could cost more than servers, Google warns: “A Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today’s computers doesn’t improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag.”
Related: The Price of Performance – Intel inside again for new Google servers – Google builds own servers to cut costs – Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in PC’s
5 Responses to “Cost of Powering Your PC”
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May 24th, 2007 @ 7:53 am
Google has adopted the technology for their servers. And they are working to have the technology adopted by manufacturers; so when we buy computers they will use this technology to reduce waste. This is good since not many of us cannot eliminate this muda ourselves (since we don’t build our own computers – as Google does)…
June 30th, 2007 @ 3:50 pm
“The opportunity for savings is immense — we estimate that if deployed in 100 million PCs running for an average of eight hours per day, this new standard would save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California’s energy rates…”
November 18th, 2007 @ 6:47 pm
“Google realized that because its computing needs were very specific, it could design and build computers that were cheaper and lower power than off the shelf alternatives.”
August 3rd, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
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