Energy usage (watt) of MacBook Pro 2010 with 8GB Ram and i7

By idle state, I meant awake, but doing nothing (waiting for input), with no external devices and wifi/bluetooth off (I use cable). I'm working most of the time during the day (66%) and have some private use in the evening (33%), so backlight would be rather bright (daylight).

As for charging battery or not, I would be interested in energy consumption by the machine itself, i.e. when measuring at the power cord a mean over a charge and discharge cycle.

I could also put the question differently: the mean energy consumption for a MacBook Pro 2001 17'' 4GB i5 machine is ca 21 Watts according to an apple document (idle with display on). I asked the german support, but they could not answer my question how much more energy would be used by
a) 8GB instead of 4GB
b) i7 instead of i5

Thanks so far, I did not think of all the variables, just the mean energy consumption.

Well, I need a computer professionally. At least now.
But I want to keep my environments impact at a minimum.

So I need precise data to evaluate what I do:
money is one thing, because it's usually very finite,
but even more important is recyclability, energy, ...:
10 Watts difference (e.g. for 8GB instead of 4GB?)
will yield, over mac lifetime of say 10 years (the laptop
im am currently typing on is 8+ years old, but is slowly
going towards being obsolete, even with ISA SSD upgrade):
10 h/d * 365 d/y * 10 W * 10 y = 365000 Wh = 365kWh.

I try to save energy, so this is approx my direct energy usage
of 1 year (I have no car, do not fly, have no refrigerator,
do not heat my appartement above 10 deg Celcius, ...
but strangely I have a computer and I am a programmer ...).

For me, it's important. It is relevant for my decisions:
5 Watts? I will be tempted by 8GB. 10 Watts? I don't know.
(I do setup work, so I use VMs a lot, so I need quite some
memory for that ...).

Well, this is an old discussion.
The best would be not to buy.
That's what I decided to do.

I will stick with my ancient Windows PC until it dies.
Then, I will buy a machine, which allows me to participate
in the computing arena, unless I decided to give it up.

For now, there seems to be no machine,
which fits my needs (lots of ram for VMs
for the setup development I have to do)
with minimum resources and readily
available information for evaluating
the resource usage: resource usage
is never absolute (otherwise I would
have to kill myself), but a compromise,
and for compromises, I need information.

Thanks however for your thoughts.

Will now mark this question as answered,
I don't think I will get one.

Ok, thanks a lot for the info. I had just too freely deduced that from the switch of my old HDD (in 2009 it had 7 years) to a new SDD, which yielded a drop of mean idle enery usage from 30W to 25W. Maybe with new HDD drives or with big SSDs, it's different (I only replaced my broken HDD with a 32 GB (ISA 😟 ...) SDD so I could use that old Laptop longer).