Talk about perrywis and pound foolish, they are worried about reducing the draw from 10 watts to 3 watts when their problem is in the THOUDANDS of MEGAWATT range.
Not only that, the fools in California are pusing for electric cars that you plug into the grid at night!
Well, do the math. The article said that each household has 10-20 devices which consume power while on standby, which sounds about right. If each one saved seven watts, that's about 105 watts per household. California has about 11 million households, so that's 1,115,000,000 watts, or 1.15 thousand megawatts. Since you asserted that their problem is in the "thousands of megawatt" range, this sounds like one partial solution which avoids constructing any more generating capacity.