To put that into perspective, that's more than my entire household including my server that has an old GPU in it
Water heating is electric yet we still don't use 450W×year≈4MWh of electricity. In winter we just about reach that as a daily average (as a household) because we need resistive heating to supplement the gas system. Constantly 450W is a huge amount of energy for flipping some toggles at home with voice control and streaming video files
Modern construction techniques including super insulated walls and tight building envelops, heat exchangers, can dramatically reduce heating and cooling loads.
Just saying it's not as outrageous as it might seem.
Oh for sure! Otherwise we'd be heating our homes directly with electricity.
Thanks for putting concrete numbers on it!
Additionally - it's actually not that hard to put this entire load on solar.
4x350watt panels, 1 small inverter/mppt charger combo and a 12v/24v battery or two will do you just fine in the under $1k range. Higher up front cost - but if power is super expensive it's a one time expense that will last a decade or two, and you get to feel all nice and eco-conscious at the same time.
Or you can just not run the GPUs, in which case my usage falls back to ~100w. I You can drive lower still - but it's just not worth my time. It's only barely worth thinking about at 450W for me.
My own server doesn't run voice recognition so I can't speak to that (I can only opine that it can't be worth a constant draw of 430W to get rid of hardware switches and buttons), but my server also does streaming video and replaces SaaS services, so similar to what you mention, at around 20W
Dell R720 - 125W
Primary NAS - 175W
Friend's Backup NAS - 100W
Old i5 Home Server - 100W
Cisco 2921 VoIP router - 80W
Brocade 10G switch - 120W
Various other old telecom gear - 100W
450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go. It's also super trivial to put on solar (actually my current project - although I had to scale the solar system way up to make ROI make sense because power is cheap in my region). But seriously, panels are cheap, LFP batteries are cheap, inverters/mppts are cheap. Even in my region with the cheap power, moving my house to solar has returns in the <15 years range.
Nobody made that claim
> 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go
It's a quarter of one's fair share per the philosophy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society
If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference
Emphasis mine. I have a rack that draws 200w continuously and I don't feel great about it, even though I have 4.8kW of panels to offset it.
The remaining difference in cost is boosted by the cost of ethanol, which is much cheaper in the US due to abundance of feedstock and heavy subsidies on ethanol production.
The petrol and diesel account for a relatively small fraction on both continents. The "normal" prices in Europe aren't reflective of the cost of the fossil fuel itself. In point of fact, countries in Europe often have lower tax rates on diesel, despite being generally worse for the environment.
Americans drive larger vehicles because our politicians stupidly decided mandating fuel economy standards was better than a carbon tax. The standards are much laxer for larger vehicles. As a result, our vehicles are huge.
Also, Americans have to drive much further distances than Europeans, both in and between cities. Thus gas prices that would be cheap to you are expensive to them.
Things are the way they are because basic geography, population density, and automotive industry captured regulatory and zoning interests. You really can't blame the average American for this; they're merely responding to perverse incentives.
It's lazy to dunk on America as a whole, go look at the list of countries that have met their climate commitments and you'll see it's a pretty small list. Germany reopening coal production was not on my bingo card.