[brc]

Really, that stuff is small potatoes. Look outside at night time and see how much power goes into lighting. Then heating/cooling, large scale manufacture.

It was fashionable a few years back to turn off your devices 'at the wall' so stop so-called 'vampire use' - which was TVs and other equipment on stand by. It sounded plausible - but in reality is just noise in the overall consumption picture, and is just window dressing to make people feel like they are doing something.

I'll agree that idling PCs and monitors should go into sleep mode like laptops do, but that stuff is not going to make the slightest dent in consumption anyway. Compare the power consumption of an electronic device with something like an iron or a stove or a clothes dryer and you'll see why. And that's before you start looking at heavy industry and large-scale building temperature control.

[insky]

Large wattage items aren't on for that long in my experience. We could get our electric use right down and probably run it on solar during the summer months, save for the fridge/freezer, fan in the bathroom, the kettle and hair dryer.

Even with our paltry electric use we are still getting high bills (UK)! Expense is the biggest incentive for us to get our electric use down.

If server farms have become a bigger polluter than the aviation industry, I see that as a challenge. Use the hardware as efficiently as possible. Caching layers could hugely reduce CPU use. Perhaps we could measure an app's power consumption aswell as bandwidth use?