[Jaysun]

Conservatives often blast Democrats for failing to acknowledge that markets adapt to pressures (e.g. that doubling taxes will shift people's behavior and thus often not double revenue), but this is a case where conservatives need to acknowledge that markets will adapt. The amount of adaptation may not be easily predictable, but I suspect it will be quite significant.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see. I'm not a very good sparring partner on this subject because I would prefer laissez faire over anything else, which makes me somewhat of a zealot.

It just seems to me that if reducing the power used were easy someone would have done it and slapped a sticker on their toaster (or whatever) that says, "USES LESS ELECTRICITY! SAVE UP TO $_ PER YEAR OVER OTHER BRANDS" to gain a competitive edge.

[supercat]

It just seems to me that if reducing the power used were easy someone would have done it and slapped a sticker on their toaster (or whatever) that says, "USES LESS ELECTRICITY! SAVE UP TO $_ PER YEAR OVER OTHER BRANDS" to gain a competitive edge.

There are 8,766 hours/year. One watt-year is thus 8.766kW-hours; at $0.10/kWH, that's $0.88. A device that could save 5 watts would thus save about $4.38 in electricity depending upon climate (during the winter, in an electrically-heated home, wasted electricity costs nothing; in a gas-heated home it costs something but less than full value; in the summer, wasted electricity adds to air-conditioning costs and thus costs extra).

From a marketing standpoint, one would thus be faced with the prospect of trying to sell people on the fact that a device uses $5 per year less worth of electricity than its competitors. Somehow I think that's going to fall pretty far down on customers' priority lists.

To suggest a parallel, the government decided a few years ago to require all television sets to include a closed-caption decoder. Somewhat useful device--lets me watch TV while doing something noisy. Prior to the requirement, standalone closed-caption decoders cost hundreds of dollars. If one manufacturer had decided to build them into some of its sets, it would probably have added over $100 to the cost. Today, however, it is clear that such decoders add considerably less than $100 to the cost of a TV set, given that you can get TV sets with decoders built in for under $100.