Electricity prices are rising in Europe for at least the last 10-15 years (which accelerated since 2022). The higher rates the more people care about power consumption.

Like the sibling comment said, electricity prices are going up. We're getting peaks of 40c/kWh here.

In addition summers are getting hotter and extra energy usage in hardware is translated directly to extra heat. I need to run my AC more in the summer because my tiny server rack is producing so much heat.

During winters it's kinda handy though =)

It is not only about efficiency, but also about these so called MiniPCs (N100, Raspberry, Rockchip, etc.) being sold for > 100 bucks these days and with a little effort you can build a REAL server with ECC and NVMe based on older used hardware for only a little more money with ECC RAM, similar efficiency, way more power, cool remote features like AMT / ILO and better OS / Software support due to x64 architecture.

I think the whole "Raspberry as a home server" discussion is pretty much overrated since the prices went up, because nowadays it always seems to be a compromise in terms of price / performance.

When electricity price went up 3 orders of magnitude.