Today is Earth Day. We shut off the stuff in our house for an hour today in an effort to promote awareness about power consumption.
Its not a day that actually reduces power demand in the long term, and other than awareness is just a tiny tiny blip in terms of power consumption. We need to not only be aware of how much power we use, but take active steps in reducing consumption.
You can’t change people, and you can’t tell them they need to get by with less, however you can appeal to their pocket books, and you can put policies in place that improve power efficiencies in many of the devices you will purchase over the next few years.
Consider my computer monitor. I have an LG LCD monitor connected to my laptop. But most of the time I’ll unplug my laptop and the monitor will go into standby mode. The weird thing is, that standby mode – while using less power – doesnt stop using power altogether. Why doesn’t the monitor just say to itself “I’ve been in standby for awhile, I should probably just turn myself off” ?
Are people really that lazy? Their user experience needs to include moving the mouse and having the monitor pop back on? Why can’t you just press the button, its not as though the tubes need to warm up?
This happens with the majority of the devices in your house. Your DVD Player, Stereo, Cable Box, Television, etc ,etc – they all use power in ‘standby mode’. These vampire devices use what in a single household is a small amount of power, but when you multiply that by 1,000,000 homes, it starts to be a big number.
A lot of devices consumed power regardless of state because they had to keep information around. Like what channels were programmed into the TV, or what time was displayed on your VCR. Do we still need another clock? Manufacturers need to be told to integrate certain efficiencies. If these features are important then the market figure will out how to address them.
Critics will say that efficiency only goes so far, and that is true. However the effects of improving appliance and device efficiencies has been tremendous – and we can do way better. I think something on the order of 100 coal fired power plants didn’t have to be built, simply because of efficiency standards that were put into place by regulating bodies and lobbyists.