GSlusher

The EU Stabs Apple in the Back

From a pure engineering standpoint, that would be "nice," but also a major disaster. It might require replacing every outlet in a country. The economic cost would be staggering, but so would be the environmental cost. It's why the US (and Britain) have not embraced metrification. It would require re-tooling of entire industries. The impact on plumbing, alone, could be many billions. Every plumber would have to carry complete stocks of both British/US hardware (inch-based) and metric hardware for decades. It would double their inventory.

However, MOST countries in the EU already DO use a standard power plug for ungrounded systems. (Some countries use a different plug for major appliances, just as in the US.) The UK, Ireland, and Italy are different. The "Euro-plug" may be the most widely-used in the world.


On Jun 30 02:13 PM numinary wrote:

> from a pure engineering/efficiency standpoint, it seems to make the
> most sense to try to drag all of the EU countries into using a similar
> wall plug outlet and electrical power source would provide the largest
> returns. Does this make too much sense for legislators? Or is it
> just that this is a more inconvenient issue for them to deal with?
>
>
> As someone that goes on company junkets around Europe, I would certainly
> like to see a universal power plug rather than a universal cell phone
> power cable...