[QUOTE=storm5510;460307]I suspect rates will change for many on the grid they are feeding into.[/QUOTE]

In which direction does your suspicion lie?

I am a bit surprised by the per-KWH total. I had the idea that it was around $0.12.
Actually, all the categories added up to $0.09233. This excludes taxes and fixed fees.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;460302]Modern data centers use 90%+ of the power they consume directly for computing.[/QUOTE]

I think 90% would be considered very good. Google gets [url=https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/]89%[/url] (PUE 1.12) in 2017. The Uptime Institute's 2014 Data Center Survey shows an average efficiency of 59% (PUE 1.7); more recent ones don't give PUE numbers, and surveys before 2013 have much lower PUEs. (2013 was 61%, PUE 1.65; 2011 was 53%, PUE 1.89; 2007 was 40%, PUE 2.5.)

[QUOTE=VBCurtis;460309]In which direction does your suspicion lie?[/QUOTE]

Up, even it they (Pennsylvania) have something coming on-line to replace it with.

If the most-expensive source of power goes out of business, the average cost of power (to the utility) decreases. It's not obvious whether this "Average cost" effect is larger or smaller than "decrease in supply -> price goes up!" from elementary microecon.

In regulated-utility areas, the utility is often granted a fixed profit margin on power; if that is true for the area when three mile island runs, rates would go down since the average cost of power goes down; though in the short run the costs to close 3MI may add to rates. So, perhaps a short-run increase to pay for closing the plant, with a long-run decrease.

[QUOTE=storm5510;460307]She had to pump it up. I've never actually seen one like that. Cutler-Hammer perhaps...[/QUOTE]

Now [B]this[/B] is a circuit breaker:
[YOUTUBE]1jPZLgIyj9s[/YOUTUBE]

[QUOTE=Madpoo;460030]I see my state, Washington, has the cheapest in the US. All that
hydro power.[/QUOTE]

That's my state these days as well! And in two counties in particular the electrical rates are exceptionally low. Chelan and Douglas counties have energy charges below $0.025/kwh for residential and commercial use! Douglas county has a more favorable cost structure and the total cost including demand charge and monthly charges is in the $0.025-$0.03/kWh range.

Douglas county's utility is also a pure public cooperative, produces 100% hydropower, and depends on a drainage which is expected to gain both rainfall and snowfall under most plausible climate trajectories over the next 100 years. The power utility also operates a fiber-to-the-home network which provides most of the county's population with cheap gigabit internet!

Couple this with solar subsidies of $0.15 to $0.54/kwh (gross production - no net grid contribution required) and long sunny summer days and the circumstances are pretty optimal for serious-hobby-scale distributed computation. If I ever end up living out there with space, cooling, and power to spare, I'll gladly host forum members' equipment at cost

Just under 14 cents Canadian
 

P.S. I've been trying to determine the Wattage usage of a typical CPU and GPU.

Using a website a fellow forum friend provided I am calculating in the range of 150 to 200 Watts for a fully loaded Sandy or Ivy (i.e. i5-750 or i5-3570K)

And about another 150-250 watts for my current and potential GPUs: GTX-750, GTX-780 ... GTX-1080.

Does this seem about reasonable?

If so then I am paying about $20 per month for my always-on fully-loaded CPU.
And about another $20 or $25 for the GPU.

I have 7 Kaby Lakes using about 420 watts at the wall. That's with an efficient PSU, no OC, no disks, minimal memory, no GPU. So I'd say best case for the CPU is 60 watts, 100 should be easily achievable.

I have 4 Skylakes pulling ~270 watts at the wall. They each have a hard drive now. If I undervolted more, I could probably save another 50 watts, but I've been lazy.

Typical desktop CPUs are around 90 watts, plus about 15 watts for motherboard and memory. You'll be lucky to get an 80% efficient CPU in an off-the-shelf desktop, so multiply that by 1.25.

When I use to calculator and pick a configuration similar to mine I get 'X' Watts for the PC:

Then if I add 1 of each of these 3 GPUs I get an additional: 'Y' watts
GTX-750Ti: 60 ... wow very efficient.
GTX-780-Ti: 254 ... NOT WOW - more than 4 times the power for about 20% speed up.
GTX-1080Ti: 255 ... wow-ish. 4 times the power for about 2.5X speedup over the 750.

Unless there is an error in the calculator it tells me the best bang-for-the-buck is lots of GTX-750 instead of any of these faster, more expensive and power hungry cards.

OR certainly 1080 rather than 780.