With the help of Stanford University, Sony recently made a version of Folding@Home available to PlayStation 3 owners worldwide. Helping out science is as simple as pressing X a couple times or even just letting your console standby for a bit. While this requires little to no work on your end, it does cost you a little cash out of your pocket each month to pay for the electricity. How much, you ask? That's what we're here for.
We've taken a few bits of information and compiled a rough and estimated chart of how much it would cost you to run Folding@Home on a PlayStation 3 for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These are estimates in the truest sense of the word. For instance, according to Stanford University's Folding@Home FAQ for PS3, a PlayStation 3 should use about 200W of power while running the application. For our electrical costs, we borrowed a chart from Nebraska's website that breaks down the average electricity costs for each state during December 2006.
The chart below shows, in order of cheapest to most expensive, each state, how many cents per kilowatt hour it charges on average, and the cost of running Folding@Home for a month straight. Have a look, and remember that no matter how much it costs you to run Folding@Home, it's for a very, very worthy cause and we suggest you do so if at all possible.
State | Cent/kWh | FAH | |
1 | Idaho | 4.78 | $6.88 |
2 | West Virginia | 5.09 | $7.33 |
3 | Wyoming | 5.32 | $7.66 |
4 | Oklahoma | 5.48 | $7.89 |
5 | Utah | 5.5 | $7.92 |
6 | North Dakota | 5.54 | $7.98 |
7 | Nebraska | 5.59 | $8.05 |
8 | Kentucky | 5.62 | $8.09 |
9 | Missouri | 5.7 | $8.21 |
10 | Kansas | 5.86 | $8.44 |
11 | Indiana | 6.33 | $9.12 |
12 | Iowa | 6.36 | $9.16 |
13 | South Dakota | 6.4 | $9.22 |
14 | Virginia | 6.63 | $9.55 |
15 | Arkansas | 6.64 | $9.56 |
16 | Alabama | 6.66 | $9.59 |
17 | Minnesota | 6.67 | $9.60 |
18 | Illinois | 6.69 | $9.63 |
19 | Washington | 6.76 | $9.73 |
20 | Oregon | 6.85 | $9.86 |
21 | Mississippi | 7.06 | $10.17 |
22 | Montana | 7.08 | $10.20 |
23 | Tennessee | 7.08 | $10.20 |
24 | South Carolina | 7.09 | $10.21 |
25 | Colorado | 7.15 | $10.30 |
26 | New Mexico | 7.16 | $10.31 |
27 | Georgia | 7.31 | $10.53 |
28 | Louisiana | 7.45 | $10.73 |
29 | Ohio | 7.49 | $10.79 |
30 | North Carolina | 7.57 | $10.90 |
31 | Arizona | 7.64 | $11.00 |
32 | Wisconsin | 8.08 | $11.64 |
33 | Pennsylvania | 8.44 | $12.15 |
34 | Michigan | 8.46 | $12.18 |
National Average | 8.49 | $12.23 | |
35 | Nevada | 9.39 | $13.52 |
36 | Texas | 9.56 | $13.77 |
37 | Delaware | 10.12 | $14.57 |
38 | Maryland | 10.24 | $14.75 |
39 | Florida | 10.33 | $14.88 |
40 | District of Columbia | 10.75 | $15.48 |
41 | Vermont | 11.38 | $16.39 |
42 | New Jersey | 11.47 | $16.52 |
43 | California | 12.17 | $17.52 |
44 | New York | 13.07 | $18.82 |
45 | Rhode Island | 13.16 | $18.95 |
46 | Maine | 13.32 | $19.18 |
47 | Alaska | 13.47 | $19.40 |
48 | New Hampshire | 13.99 | $20.15 |
49 | Massachusetts | 15.24 | $21.95 |
50 | Connecticut | 15.98 | $23.01 |
51 | Hawaii | 19.28 | $27.76 |