This is my first piece (hopefully not the last!) in The Economist magazine, in the latest issue of the Technology Quarterly. You’ll notice the absence of a byline (“by Cyrus Farivar”) because The Economist is old-school — they don’t have bylines. So you’ll just have to take the fact that I wrote it on faith.
Pulling the plug on standby power
Mar 9th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Energy: Billions of devices sitting idle in “standby†mode waste vast amounts of energy. What can be done about it?
STRANGE though it seems, a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. For while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idle—in “standby†mode—more than 99% of the time. And they are not alone: many other devices, such as televisions, DVD players, stereos and computers also spend much of their lives in standby mode, collectively consuming a huge amount of energy. Moves are being made around the world to reduce this unnecessary power consumption, called “standby powerâ€.
As in many other areas of environmental policy, the state of California is leading the way. On January 1st the California Energy Commission introduced mandatory standby requirements for various electronic devices—the first such obligatory regulations in the world. This is due in no small part to the efforts of Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. In the 1990s he noticed a proliferation in the number of household appliances that are never fully switched off, but spend most of the time in a standby mode, ready to spring into action when needed. The convenience of being able to switch on your television from the sofa using a remote control, in short, has a cost, since some circuits in the television must remain active, watching for signals from the remote control. Added up on a nationwide or global scale, Dr Meier realised, the wasted energy must be staggering. “We’re moving from an electromechanical world that’s on and off to an electronic world that’s never off,†he says.
He and his colleagues at LBNL set out to quantify the scale of the problem. In 1998 they released an initial study which estimated that standby power accounted for approximately 5% of total residential electricity consumption in America, “adding up to more than $3 billion in annual energy costsâ€. According to America’s Department of Energy, national residential electricity consumption in 2004 was 1.29 billion megawatt hours (MWh)—5% of which is 64m MWh. The wasted energy, in other words, is equivalent to the output of 18 typical power stations.
