Re: My goose is cooked
A wall wart type power supply can well over 90% efficient, with a few at 96%. Older ones tend to be in the 70% range with substantial idle power.
On a abstract philosophical level I'm opposed to government intervention in the marketplace beyond basic regulations, but here is where reality runs into dogmatism. A big chunk of credit goes to Energy Star (and the similar requirements from other governments). Those regulations made a huge difference in the world. Few retail customers buy on the basis of power supply efficiency or idle power, or even think about it. But, thanks to those regulations, we are in a virtuous cycle of increasing power density and a need for increasingly efficient power supply designs to support that density.
My favorite easy-to-explain design improvement is that power supplies used to have a discharge resistor to quickly drain the high voltage from internal capacitors when the power was switched off. This resistor constantly wasted power, but only provided the safety benefit for a few seconds each time the device was powered off. Efficiency regulations motivated the development of a chip (really a chip feature) that only discharges the capacitor when the pulses of the AC line are missing for a few seconds. This chip costs much more than the simple resistor, but saves far more than that in electricity over its lifetime.
Bringing it back on topic, we put all of that effort into efficient power supplies but wireless charging is typically only 50-70% efficient. It's going to be overwhelmingly the largest waste of power in running small electronics.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
