Power hungry

A couple of weeks ago Technology Guardian ran a piece by Ron West titled "Stand by for some home truths about power consumption" in which the author argued that "By focussing their efforts on TV's left in standby mode, environmentalists might just be missing the point."

Based on his own findings Ron West suggests that removing the option to use standby may encourage people to leave appliances on permanently, producing the opposite effect desired by environmentalists - greater energy consumption rather than less.

His argument is that appliances such as a kitchen fridge use considerable more energy per day than a freeview decoder left on standby and that this relatively low power consumption is preferable to appliances being left on full power.

So do the figures calculated by Ron West add up? Well not exactly. The base measurements aside (that is, the energy requirement per 24 hours by appliance), and lack of information about the appliance models (make/model/year etc), there is a failure to acknowledge that while a house is likely to have only one dish washer, most family homes have more than one TV (and associated DVD, freeview and/or VHS), stereo system and mobile phone charger.

Take for example the mobile phone charger, from his own figures the phone charger requires 0.009 kWh daily. This seems like nothing when compared with 2.5 kWh daily for the "garage fridge freezer"; (the difference being approximately 277 times.)

According to the Health Protection Agency in 2004 there were around 50 million active mobile phones in the UK (http://www.hpa.org.uk/radiation/publications/documents_of_nrpb/abstracts/absd15-5.htm). At 0.009 kWh per charger per phone on standby; that is approximately 450,000 kWh every twenty four hours. Or enough energy to power 180,000 of Ron's "Garage fridge/freezer" combo's. Yes that's right, according to Ron a city the size of Aberdeen (pop. 184,788 at the 2001 census) could have it's fridge/freezers powered for twenty four hours if everyone turned their phone chargers off rather than leaving them on standby.

Now of course this is an over simplification and doesn't take into account the energy used during a charge cycle. Nor does it account for variations across models. All the same it illustrates a fundamental flaw in Ron West's article namely that while smaller appliances may require less energy, they exist in higher numbers. That is, there are more of them so they consume more. Multiply that across an entire population and you have an astronomical waste of energy.

Should he be concerned that people would "just leave their equipment on instead"? Yes. But here again the solution is raising awareness of the simple fact that we all need to cut our energy usage, which is best done by advocating "switch off" rather than "switch mode", after all an appliance on standby isn't actually doing anything apart from facilitating laziness.

[Stand by for some home truths about power consumption, Ron West, Technology Guardian, April 12 2007].

Did you know?
One tank of petrol from a typical SUV has the energy equivalent of more than 60,000 man hours of work - roughly 100 men working around the clock for nearly a month.


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