Dell Cannot Ship Some High-Power-Consumption PCs To Western States -- July 31, 2021

Two readers sent me this link today.

This is one of those articles that seems so incredible that a) it needs to be fact-checked; and, b) if accurate, we need to check back in on this one year from now.

If accurate, it suggests that either the grid is tighter/more fragile than we realize or the legislators are simply insane.

And if this is "where we are" today, how in the world can "we manage" EVs? 

I must surely be missing something. 

The headline:

Dell Cannot Ship Alienware PCs to Certain US States Due to Power Regulations.

From the linked article:

Sometimes the fight for energy efficiency and low power consumption takes rather ugly forms. High-performance desktop gaming PCs obviously consume a lot of power and their relative power efficiency is lower when compared to that of small form-factor systems. Which is why Dell can no longer ship some of its Alienware gaming desktops to California, Colorado, and some other states. There are a number of catches though. 

Dell's high-performance Aurora R10 and Aurora R12 (both Intel and AMD-based) desktops "cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states," a notice over the company's website reads. The reason why Dell cannot ship such systems to California is because the California Energy Commission (CEC) adopted tighter appliance energy principles that outline a compulsory energy efficiency standard for PCs starting July 1, 2021, The Register reports. 

The new standards are largely based on Energy Star Computer Program and define power consumption of PCs (all kinds of PCs, including thin clients and handheld devices) in non-active states (short-idle, long-idle, sleep, and off) as well as their maximum power consumption per year. All types of power consumption are tied to the PC's expandability score (ES) (its concept was described by Energy Star several years ago) that takes into account things like high-performance graphics cards, system memory bandwidth, high-speed external ports, and other things.