The Department of Energy estimates that in the average home, 40 percent of all electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off. Add that all up, and it equals the annual output of 17 power plants, the government says. In an effort to address that, a consortium of Intel, Google, PC makers and other technology companies this week announced their intent to increase the PC's overall energy efficiency to 90 percent. ( NY Times)
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Cooling Down Computer Cyberwarming
Category: Technology
Posted on: June 15, 2007 12:11 PM, by EJGili
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... intent to increase the PC's overall energy efficiency to 90 percent. That would be quite a feat considering that most of the power consumed by modern PCs do not contribute to any useful work, but is turned into heat as a by-product of the operation of high-speed digital circuits. I recall that Google has talked about improving the efficiency of PC power supplies, efficiencies over 90% being rather easily achievable.
Posted by: Flaky | June 15, 2007 12:54 PM
Heck yeah. One quick look through any of the electrical/electronic engineering design mags will yield ads for switch mode regulators at 95% or better. Connecting that to "useful work" is another thing. You could probably get better results by just banning the use of Power Point, forever.
The other item to consider is that in the average home, "home electronics" is not the major consumer of energy. The big gulpers are things like electric water heaters, stoves, and so forth. Of course in the summer, the major villain is the air conditioner. Consequently, we're talking about a second order effect.
Posted by: JimFiore | June 15, 2007 01:33 PM
The initiative is long overdue. The other big problem is power supply consumption of inactive devices, like chargers, DVD machines, TVs etc.
It is estimated that the average microwave consumes more power/day running the clock & standby power, than from cooking. The big problem here is that the consumer looking at a $39 DVD player versus a $40 player with similar features is unlikely to know that the cheaper machine will cost him $10 in wasted standby power. So it usually pays manufacturers to cut corners on the efficiency of power consumption.
Posted by: bigTom | June 15, 2007 03:14 PM
I'm trying to work through how so much can be used while powered off. I'm guessing this means you take things like the cable box and microwave still have their clocks on, and the tiny red light on my tv, and they are "off" for more hours of the day than they are "on", then it all adds up to 40%. I'm not sure I buy that. Or does it really mean things like my oven, which is electric and has no digital readouts, is sitting there using electricity right now, without being "on"?
Posted by: Tanya | June 15, 2007 05:49 PM
Tanya, compare what happens to when you idle your car, it still uses fuel without producing any useful work. In many cases the switch you use to turn off a machine does not physically disconnect it from the net, power is still going to the power supply, and just like an idling engine a power supply will still use power even if it does nothing. How much depends on how well it is designed, and as bigTom points out, manufacturers tend not to care because consumers don't care.
Posted by: Thomas Palm | June 16, 2007 03:28 AM
Tanya, a significant part of the problem is lots of equipment isn't really off despite being turned off. The canonical example are so-called "instant on" TVs and VDUs, where there is no (supposedly annoying) delay whilst the video warms up when the unit is turned on. These are "instant on" because they really are on, just not fully on (e.g., the display is blanked and some of the electronics are de-powered). Usually, the only way to make sure they are off is to unplug them from the wall socket.
There are (at least in the UK) small meters you can get which moniter the power consumption of whatever is plugged into a wall socket. I presume such things are also available in N.America? Using one to monitor how much power your supposedly-off electronics draws can be very illuminating.
Posted by: blf | June 16, 2007 03:33 AM
The single LED on a TV set on standby consumes about 10-20 mW of power, probably consuming significantly more power than the IR-receiver waiting for a command from the remote. The problem is that the mains voltage is several hundred volts, while the LED requires about 1.2 volts. Cheap circuitry for voltage downcoversion and rectification will consume much more power than the measly LED and other useful standy circuitry. I've heard of numbers over 1W, i.e. 100 times more than the actual needed power. It shouldn't be too difficult to engineer devices with very low standby power consumption and they wouldn't be that much more expensive either. A simple solution would be to regulate standby power consumption of consumer appliances.
@Tanya: No, your old-fashion oven doesn't consume any power when not switched on.
Posted by: Flaky | June 16, 2007 05:26 AM
Tanya:
Its not the glowing LCD, its the power transformer, which draws several watts when plugged in a powering nothing. The average house has a dozen or more such devices they add up. The last number I heard was something 7% overall.
Posted by: bigTom | June 16, 2007 11:04 AM
If we go back towards computers.
Until recently the manufacturers didn't take power consumption seriously. Then the limitations of keeping processors cool started to bite. You'll notice that clock rates of computers stopped their rapid increase three to four years back. Newer transistor designs on now coming on line, and weare now getting more powerful chips for roughly the same power budget. A processors power consumption goes up at least as fast as the square of the clock frequency, one way to save considerable power is to scale back the clock-rate when speed isn't absolutely essential. I can imagine in a couple of years we might have a turbo/miser switch on our computers. Also technology to temporarily power off parts of chips that haven't been used recently (milliseconds) is being applied to some designs.
Posted by: bigTom | June 16, 2007 11:13 AM