Running a GameCube (23 watts) literally nonstop for a year would use a little over 200 kWh.
Assuming average USA electricity prices, in 2002 electricity cost ~$0.09 per kWh, so one year of that would cost an additional $18.00. That number only tends worse going forward.
A GameCube memory card would cost about $11.
As usual, it’s more expensive to be poor.
Sir Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness
9 cents is probably just generation. I’d expect to pay about the same for delivery.
Yeah, total cost is going to be at least $0.15 USD / kWh, and can be as high as $0.25 USD / kWh. I’ve lived all over the US and it’s never been less than $0.15 USD / kWh.
paying over $0.40/kWh where I am.
San Diego? SDGE is the worst.
I’m paying $0.11 kwh currently. My last house was $0.15 kwh. That’s after the fees. I think we’re going up to $0.13. I am not considered poor where we live now and $0.25 kwh would significantly change my family’s habits
That’s super nice. If you drive an EV and charge at home, $0.11 / kWh * 75 kWh = $8.25 for about 300 miles of range.
Definitely can’t beat that!
Back in 2002? I don’t think they separated generation and delivery for most utilities, at least in the US. In 1996, federal regulators made it mandatory for utilities with delivery infrastructure to accept generators’ electricity on fair/nondiscriminatory terms, and gave them some time to implement policies. Then, the actual generators started negotiating deals, but the early days were a bit chaotic, with issues in California with rolling blackouts, then the Enron bankruptcy, and then generators actually entering long term contracts with some price stability in the early 2000’s.
For a typical residential customer who didn’t go out of their way to look for side deals with generators, they wouldn’t have needed to see their bills be segmented out into generation and delivery, since most of the utilities still already had long term contracts (or owned their own generation facilities) still in effect from before the regulatory reform.
Personally, I didn’t see those numbers separated out on my bill until around 2009. And I remember my electric bill in 2000-2005 being roughly 10 cents per kwh, flat rate.
I love when I idly wonder something about a post, click into the comments, and the top comment is exactly, specifically the answer to my idle curiosity. Cheers.
I call counterfeit and homoerotic.
Fabricated and jolly, I say!
Prevaricated and flamboyant
Spurious and flaming
Manufactured and mannered
I didn’t know GC memory cards were hotswappable…
Old-school proprietary memory cards like that generally are, because they don’t mount a filesystem in the way a modern flash drive would.
You can safely remove the card without problem as long as there is no current write operation happening.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
You often needed to switch memory card to change between games, depending which card your save was on, and people would certainly not turn the console off to do that, nor does the GameCube manual say you should.
You didn’t need to turn the console off to change games? In a disc based system? Wut?
Nope. It was pretty normal for multi disc games. Once you got so far, the game would give you a “insert disc X” screen," where you’d hot swap the discs and keep playing. I remember FF on PSX doing this.
It’s actually still not a sad story! Because eventually they would have had to turn it off or they would lose electricity. This marked the start of their new saveable journey!
If they could afford the GC in the first place they could afford the memory card. As usually the parents are lazy and don’t ask their kids any questions.
