Comments on: IEA: Little gadgets consume gigawatts of power

Home electronics account for 15 percent of electricity bills and its share is growing rapidly. The International Energy Agency calls for policies to promote efficiency in consumer electronics.

[mrwater]

My suggestion - plea - would be that we find some way to make prices be an honest reflection of costs that are currently "externalized," including environmental and social costs. It seems to me that the marketplace would take care of the rest. Even though I know the world isn't that simple, if we could do it, it would be a lot better than what we have today, where we're in effect paying people to destroy the environment.

[SPARTAN VI]

Agreed. Let the free market push this, why the hell would we put this in the governement's hands.

[krosafcheg]

and we want electric cars?! ha ha lulz!

[Jerry_In_Detroit]

So tell me. How will hiring thousands of government bureaucrats, all with their associated carbon footprint, improve this situation? This solution sounds like just another appeal to feed the bureaucracy.

[mattie121]

Look at history... Refridgerators and A/C systems used to be power hogs. In the 70s or 80s, California started to legislate efficiency standards, with the feds catching on a few years later. Power consumption by these devices plummeted. Now, we have all these little power supplies everywhere. (The mac Mini I have has one, the external HD hooked up to it has one, the external speakers have one, the digital camera doc has one, and this is just for one computer station in my home). These little suckers burn power with a load present or not, because it's cheaper to make them that way. Add in things like large standby power consumption for things like TVs and the like, and guess what? All that power savings from the efficiency now engineered into your fridge is spent on low cost little power parasites.

If stand by power were limited to some small fraction of use power load (say less than 0.1% with a floor at about 0.5 watt), the amount of stand-by power reduction would be massive. Even if one were to say that 1000 gov employees were to be involved with this, we're talking about a significant reduction of power consumption of over 300 million residents of the US. The savings would still be massive, and they would accrue over a large time period.

It's well known that conservation is the largest and most easily deployable green-tech out there. Yet when there is no incentive in the market for the commercial sector to provide the improvement, it's up to an external actor (usually a reglatory entity) to step up and force the hand of the marketplace. This isn't stupid, it's wise. Right now, most buyers don't look at stand-by power when choosing what they buy; they get the cell phone that they want, and just use the charger that comes with it. The manufacturer of the charger doesn't get any benefit from making a more efficient charger, just the opposite. They have to pay higher costs to make a better charger that the consumer doesn't perceive the value of. This is either a "broken marketplace" to one perspective, or an example of "externalities" in the marketplace that bias the cost/benefit equation away from optimal decisions. No matter. However one chooses to view the market equation, when situations like this exist, it is in societies best interest for government action....

Or do we want more coal fired power plants, larger grid loads, and the like because no one really wants to pay for more efficient electronics (other than battery time in poratble devices)?

Matt R

[shootfirst]

One thing that everyone forgets about power conservation is that it will take away usability of products. Who wants to wait that few seconds while your monitor comes out of standby after you go to the bathroom to take care of business? Who wants to wait for a computer to come out of hibernation or sleep mode? Sure we may be saving power, but at the expense of our time and in days where milliseconds to load a webpage is important the seconds to minutes we waste waiting for out products to come out of standby is even more infuriating. Once you add in the costs of people throwing devices against walls and then devices breaking due to higher sophistication, not much energy is really being saved.

The real question is of usability of devices and whether we want to wait for our devices to meet our needs. We don't need to build more power conscious devices, we need to create better sources of energy which is the real issue. Better sources of energy promote innovation which is really what needs to occur, not thinking of how we can save a few watts of electricity. We live in a world where value is looked upon, spending a fortune on power friendly devices that just expire in 3 years is stupid and power friendly equates to weak.

[mattie121]

This is just wrong-headed thinking at it's worst. While there are some technologies that do require some start up time (think the office copier for the first copy of the day), there are many, many more where a second or less (heck even more) is insignificant when compared to the use case. A few seconds delay won't effect the overall time that it takes to charge your cell phone or iPod. Old cathode ray tubes required longer start up times, but the march of technology has swept the significance of these times away. Sure, the back light in my current TFT flat panel TV takes some time to fire, but the newest LED TVs have no such requirement, nor do the LED back-lights in the newer laptops.

While I would agree that delays in web page load times can be frustrating, the "wake up" time of my laptop is already long compared to a couple of seconds to fire up a better power supply, assuming of course that it would even take that long.

Being open minded, I'm willing to admit there are a few devices than may require faster start up times that would require higher stand by power, but surely these are a very small minority of the devices out there. But to use the excuse that we're impatient and some devices really would require higher stand by currents as an excuse to ignore the mass (And majority) of products that do not is flawed logic at it's worst. Heck, every power brick used for charging batteries doesn't need to be "instant". Also, this flawed logic assumes that there will be no advances in tech that would reduce the current required warm up times. Requiring lower stand by power consumption levels would likely stimulate this very kind of developments.

[kieranmullen]

Is having more really a problem? Many of these gadgets require power bricks which are not very efficient, take up space and cause you to lose power even when not plugged in. (Phantom power loss) Something needs to be done there. I have about 20 bricks or so for cell phones, cameras, external dvd drives, power antenna, phone etc.... This should be worked on.


[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.]

[perib]

I know that conservation is important. I have replaced all our high use bulbs with CF, and when the LED bulbs start to work like real bulbs, I will go to them (assuming a price within the bounds of reason). We have changed the thermostat setting to be more efficient, consolidate our trips, minimize time that the fridge is open... My rough calculations, going by the warmth of the cell phone transformer, it is well below 1 watt, perhaps 0.1 watt? So, I estimate that we are saving more energy than a thousand people who feel virtuous because they unplug their cell phone charger. And going without air conditioning one day this summer will save more energy than unplugging your cell phone charger every day for the rest of your life.

I am so tired of these stories that have no details. Give me some usable numbers!
I think many of these scientists and reporters are attention ******. Do they think we are all too stupid to keep reading these articles if they included a few real numbers (such as the energy consumption of a cell phone charger when it has no phone plugged in).

Try michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html I dont know how good his numbers are, but at least he has some.

[cp256]

I must have a hundred or so small gadget type things kicking around in addition to the 25 or so computers and servers, 9 of which run 24/365 for my home based internet business and day trading. I have a big old pig of a 36" tube TV that is on 18 hours a day between my stay at home sweetheart and me. My typical monthly electric bill is between $225 and $250 USD. The good news? In the past 4 years I have reduced my electricity consumption over 40% with more efficient equipment. Even though my daily driver is a 3 year old AWD SUV with a 400 HP Corvette engine, I drive 0 miles to work, it only has 7,800 miles on the clock. In the winter I use a setback thermostat set at 68/62 and shut off the radiators in rooms that are seldom used with their doors shut. Laundry only gets done with full loads. I turn off the faucet while I brush my teeth. I use plenty of compact fluorescents and don't leave unneeded lights on.

While I dislike waste, I'm certainly not an eco-whacko. I refuse to feel guilty about my gadgets and the occasional Tim the Tool Man Err Err Errrr more power suckage. Call me an ugly American, I don't care. We have lots of untapped energy in the U.S. (I love the smell of coal smoke), global warming is a tranzi sham and I pay for the power I use, in whatever form. I don't care what kind of BS Algore or the Obamessiah spew out on a daily basis, it's not honest science, it's set the outcome first and make the model fit it hooey.

1,700 terawatt-hours? I'll bet it is more like 3,000 terawatt-hours and I'll bet we have plenty of excess generation capacity, clean, renewable and otherwise by then to handle it.

[libertyforall1776]

Umm, NO! Government must NOT step in -- they are already doing too much harm and regulate too much. How about LESS government -- just for a change.

[mattie121]

So, for those of you who want some numbers, these are from the APS end-user energy study at

http://www.aps.org/energyefficiencyreport/report/aps-energyreport.pdf

Since 1975, CA energy efficiency programs are now saving 35 TWH/year. A bit more than a quarter of this savings is from applience efficiency, about a quarter from building standards, and the rest from utility efficiency programs.

Using 1972 as a baseline, fridge energy consumption is down to 25% of the base line (as of about 2002). 2/3rd of this savings was driven by state standards before any fed action on the issue occurred.

Check pages 69 and 70 of the above listed report for these charts.

To liberty for all, even Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations was willing to admit that there are areas where market forces fail to optimize. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that market constructs that don't properly account for costs, benefits and risks will be definition end up with wrong price points? Doesn't the failure of regulation in the derivitives market show anything to you?

I'm not advocating that one feel guilty for the way things are, but rather, to use numbers and quantitative analysis to look for areas where great benefit can be achieved for very little social costs. This is called intelligent action, and is the hall-mark of enlightened societies.

[sharpestsharpy]

Apple's latest Cinema Display for the MacBook is an interesting development. It has "Integrated Power" which basically means it has a power lead for the MacBook so you don't need to use two power supplies.

Apple are selling this a usability thing, you don't waste time getting your power brick out of your bag, but I bet it saves a few watts as well.