Kind of a lurker here but.....
This feels similar to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations on vehicle emissions and pollution but instead of vehicles, they are forcing electrical standards on computers and components.
I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand I understand what they are trying to do, less electricity = less carbon emissions in theory. On the other there is so many other things they could do to lower electrical consumption and make more of a difference.
I also really don't understand the waiver for large companies, it should be the opposite put consumption restrictions on large and medium businesses/organizations and let consumers and small businesses have little to no restrictions, they aren't the ones using massive amounts of power.
A few questions I thought of while writing this:
Are manufacturers now going to try and always meet the California standards so that they don't have to sell multiple PC or component sub-models based on location now? i.e. Instead of having a California compliant computer and another one that is sold elsewhere, all computers made going forward in a few years will meet the standard?
Are people outside the state going to have to pay more now for PCs to meet these standards for California? And won't this limit supply more now that California has less variety of lets say PSUes?
Are they going to put an emphasis on lowering power consumption at the expense of performance, I was told when CARB introduced emissions standards on cars, the first few years after performance really suffered. Will computers follow that trend?
Doesn't software also contribute heavily to power consumption? Wouldn't a better solution be getting companies to use/write more efficient software or OSes?
I wonder if anyone will bench test the performance and the AC power consumption between the California compliant model and the regular model? Also could this effect voltages and current going through the system and create other issues say: increased coil whine, higher thermals because less power in given to fan motors, etc?
