In reply to:


Well, the obvious reason is that it consumes electrical power when plugged in, which is very expensive (money and environment) to produce simply to waste again as heat. And if the building is air-conditioned, multiply that again by more power required to remove that heat from the building.

Quite wasteful. And Californians wonder about their electricity problems.. (dunno where you are, but Tony's in California).



Which is why my home docking station has a built in 240volt microswitch at the back of the docking sled that only closes and powers up the docking station when the empeg is fully inserted.

To power my docking station down completely so it uses no power, I simply pull the empeg out slightly [about 1/2 an inch] which means its still pretty secure in the docking stattion, but the power supply is turned off.

While the power saved by this idea is small, we all have to start somewhere and the cost of the microswitch and wiring was only a dollar or two. While it is quite likely that the power savings over 5 years will not exceed the cost of putting this feature into my docking station, you wonder why bother?

The cost to the country and the planet of building more power stations (even if they are renewable power sources) makes it worth while.

RE: Californian power shortages.

Your comment about the air conditioning using lots of power to remove excess heat is a good point.

I recall seeing a program about the power shortages in California and the program commentator blamed the dot com companies (or those still left - the program/news item was made last year) for causing the power shortages.

Their comments related to how easy a data center housing tens or hundreds of rack mounted servers could be setup almost overnight anywhere in California, causing a massive stress on local utility companies resources - these utility companies don't know the data centers are there and can't plan the wiring and other infrastructure in advance and they can come and go quickly.

They mostly blamed the computers (rack mounted servers) for wasting lots of power.

All of which are probably quite valid comments, but the point about power usage that they seemed to miss is that the computers themselves probably aren't that excessive in terms of power usage - its the air conditioning required to remove any excess heat from the secure 'bunker' that the computers are located in for security reasons, and from the rest of the building where the people in the building are thats the biggest user of power, not the computers themselves.
You could argue that the heat has to be removed due to inefficient processor and other components that require excess cooling - to some extent that is true.

I guess the point is:
don't overlook the heat issue as its a hidden 'cost' most people don't even consider when talking about power usage.