Flat-Panel Displays Require More Energy Than You Think
Interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal: That Giant Sucking Sound May Be Your New TV
The news is that flat-panel TVs, especially plasma displays, require much more energy than most consumers expect. Did you really think your TV would use more electricity than your refrigerator?
Key takeaways:
Consider that a 42-inch plasma set can consume more electricity than a full-size refrigerator — even when that TV is used only a few hours a day. Powering a fancy TV and full-on entertainment system — with set-top boxes, game consoles, speakers, DVDs and digital video recorders — can add nearly $200 to a family’s annual energy bill.
And it’s not just the TV itself. Peripherals, like DVD players, and home theatre systems only increase the energy consumption.
Assuming each screen is on five hours a day, the annual energy bill for the conventional 28-inch television set would be about $30 a year, compared with about $130 for the 60-inch plasma model, assuming power costs 12 cents a kilowatt hour. By the time other devices are added — including game consoles, speakers and DVDs — the cost to power the whole works can top $200 annually. (How to do the math: Something that draws a constant 100 watts of electricity uses 2.4 kilowatt hours of electricity in a 24-hour period or 876 kilowatt hours in a year. At 12 cents a kilowatt hour, the annual cost would be $105.12.)
Ultimately, they pin most of the blame on Energy Star ratings for TVs. Currently, Energy Star judges energy consumption in TVs only in standby mode, which limits its usefulness.
How does this all end? Help and clearer information for consumers is on the way:
For its part, the EPA appears to have settled on a process that will allow consumers to compare sets of the same size, across technology types. The agency expects to have improved Energy Star labels on television screens by November 2008 and to get them on set-top boxes, also in active and standby modes, by December 2008.
