Fritz
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Size matters
« on: 2010-01-02 11:42:46 » |
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And I thought cathode ray boobtubes used more juice ... hmmm.... seems we replaced all our monitors with LCD monitors at work to save energy ?
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Fritz
Source: Economist.com
Author: n/a
Date: Dec 4th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
Big-screen televisions are being put on a crash diet
THE energy cops in California are clamping down again. Not content with the federal government’s voluntary Energy Star standard for home electronics, the Golden State’s energy commissioners voted unanimously on November 18th to introduce their own mandatory requirements for electricity-guzzling high-definition television (HDTV) sets. From the beginning of 2011 all new HDTVs with screens measuring up to 58 inches along a diagonal will have to use a third less electricity than today’s models. By 2013, their consumption will need to have fallen to half of present levels. The move is expected to save Californians up to $1 billion a year in electricity charges.
The state’s new mandatory requirements for television sets are expected to kick-start a national trend. As the biggest market in America, what California does today, the rest of the country tends to do tomorrow—if only because manufacturers find it too expensive to make different products for different regions.
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Most makers of liquid-crystal display (LCD) sets welcome the edict. They see it as a way of increasing sales at the expense of their rivals. By contrast, manufacturers of plasma televisions have been fighting the provision tooth and claw. Plasma HDTV sets are still the best for watching sports and feature films because of their dark blacks, exceptional contrast and rapid image-tracking, but they have a reputation for being energy hogs. Old-fashioned cathode-ray-tube televisions remain the most frugal sets, using typically no more than 0.23 watts of electricity per square inch of screen area. Their latter-day LCD cousins consume 0.27 watts per square inch, and plasma sets need as much as 0.36 watts per square inch.
Such differences may seem trifling, but screen areas have soared over the past decade. The old tube televisions rarely came with screens measuring more than 32 inches (giving a screen area of 490 square inches). Today’s wide-screen LCD models have screen sizes of typically 42 inches (750 square inches), while plasma panels for residential use have screens of up to 58 inches (1,440 square inches) or so.
Ever since the sale of supersized HDTVs began to rocket earlier this decade, the amount of power consumed by television sets and their ancillary equipment (set-top boxes, DVD players, video-game consoles and digital-video recorders) has tripled. It now accounts for 10% of the electricity used in Californian homes, compared with 3% a couple of decades ago.
Bigger screens are not the only culprit. People keep their sets switched on far longer these days—though more often to watch films and play video games than to watch television shows. On top of that, there are now more sets around the home. Where once there was one set per household, there is now one per person.
All of which adds up to a lot of juice being guzzled—nearly 9 billion kilowatt-hours annually in California—just on gawping at the goggle box. The California Energy Commission thinks that is way too much. The state prides itself on having kept its electricity consumption per person constant (at roughly 7,000 kilowatt-hours annually) for the past 30 years. That has been achieved through strict energy standards for homes and appliances. Meanwhile, the rest of America has seen its electricity consumption per capita increase over the period by 40% (to 12,000 kilowatt-hours annually).
Are California’s new mandatory requirements for television sets really necessary? The current voluntary standard, Energy Star 3.0, introduced a little over a year ago, has already reduced the power consumption of television sets by an average of 30%. The next version of the specification, Energy Star 4.0, should cut energy consumption by a further 40% when it goes into effect in May 2010. A year later, Energy Star 5.0 will require television sets to use 65% less electricity than today. Overall, California’s own mandatory requirements will be slightly more stringent than Energy Star in 2011, but considerably less so from 2012 onwards.
So why is the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) of America bleating so loudly? It has issued scaremongering statements about California losing $50m in tax revenue and upwards of 4,000 jobs if plasma television sets are forced out of the market. The state’s new television rules, it claims, will limit consumer choice, lead to higher prices and stymie new technologies, like 3-D television, that makers hope to introduce over the next year or two.
Your correspondent finds it puzzling that the industry lobby should show such little faith in its members’ ability to innovate. The CEA admits that plasma-makers have improved the energy efficiency of their sets by more than 40% during the past two years alone. Compared with LCD sets, reducing the energy requirements of plasma panels still further is difficult—given the need to strip reluctant electrons off atoms of xenon or neon gas trapped in thousands of minuscule glass beads built into the screen. But such technological improvements are not beyond the wit of innovative firms like Panasonic and Samsung.
No, if plasma televisions are driven out of the market, it will not be because of tougher energy standards. Their fate depends far more on whether manufacturers can make LCD sets bigger, better and cheaper. Improvements here are imminent, thanks to the development of arrays of light-emitting diodes for illuminating the liquid-crystal screen from behind instead of relying on duller fluorescent tubes at the edges. Also, the move to higher “refresh rates”—with the screen being repainted 240 times a second instead of 60 or 120 times at present—should make LCD televisions far better at handling moving objects in sporting events.
Truth be told, three out of four HDTV sets currently on sale in America (over 1,000 models at the last count) already comply with the Californian requirement for 2011—and that includes a fair number of today’s plasma televisions. Some 300 models on sale even meet the state’s tougher standard for 2013.
As for the rest, your correspondent expects to see them at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. With the first phase of the Californian requirement being, in effect, the same as the Energy Star 4.0 specification that comes in next spring, manufacturers will have already started tooling up for the new lower-energy sets.
They would have done so with or without any mandatory requirements from California. The market has spoken: in a study carried out by the CEA itself, 89% of respondents declared that the next television set they bought would be an energy-efficient one. Come the new year, your correspondent will be lining up to buy one, too. It will probably have a plasma screen.
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