California Publishes Television Efficiency Standards For 2011

eldavojohn writes "It's been nine months since California announced their intentions to create new standards on energy-consuming televisions in their state, but yesterday the California Energy Commission finally released the first draft of the regulations. (More information straight from the horse's mouth.) If you live in another state, you may be unfamiliar with California's history of mandating power usage among anything from dishwashers to washing machines to other household appliances. This has also led to California pushing to ban incandescent light bulbs. From their FAQ on TV Efficiency Standards: 'The proposed standards have no effect on existing televisions. If approved, they would only apply to TVs sold in California after January 1, 2011. The first standard (Tier 1) would take effect January 1, 2011, and reduce energy consumption by average of 33 percent. The second measure (Tier 2) would take effect in 2013 and, in conjunction with Tier 1, reduce energy consumption by an average of 49 percent.' The Draft from December 2008 is available on their site (PDF, with a shorter 'Just the Facts' flier for those of you without two hours to burn). There's no indication whether that's what they're going with, or if it's been updated since then."

Comments

Counterpoints

[eldavojohn]

So I submitted the summary and it was getting long, I didn't have enough room to add the counter arguments against this proposal (I may have made it look fairly unopposed). While the governator had his monicker on the linked documents, the New York Times has him likening this to water:

I am totally against protectionist policies because it never works. You have to understand that we get our water from outside California. We get it from the Colorado River, for instance. Why can we get the water from the Colorado River but we can't get renewable energy from outside the state? We get most of our cars from outside the state; why can't we get renewable energy?

With Reuters outlining some challenges. Aside from that, you have some groups like the CEA speaking out against it and a surprisingly negative response from the California citizens for smart clean energy claiming that it cuts jobs for citizens. A rep from them said:

We all believe in the importance of energy efficiency, but the CEC's proposed regulation is simply bad policy that will do little to achieve energy efficiency and a lot to destroy California jobs. The consumer electronics industry has been trying to work with the CEC since day one on alternatives that would help achieve energy efficiency without causing undue harm on California's economy. But time and time again, we have been disappointed with the CEC's approach and process.

Re:Counterpoints

[UltraAyla]

Higher cost. Seriously...

doubtful. Efficiency regulations have a long history of saving consumers money. Even if it costs 10% more, which is unlikely, you're going to save a significant amount of money in its usage and easily recoup that cost over the lifetime of the product. Most efficiency regulations save consumers money rather than cost them money.

Re:About time...

[dgatwood]

I think we all deserve better TVs frankly and I think it is fair to say that the TV industry as a whole has failed to step up. We still have brand new TVs which draw almost as much power "off" as they do turned on with the sound blazing...

Either you don't know what you're talking about or you are lying to push a political position. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you simply know nothing about modern electronics.

First, modern TVs use much less power than older TVs. The move away from CRTs alone made a big improvement (ignoring projection TVs), and even within the CRT space, things improved a lot over the years when they built those.

Second, power consumption when idle is almost invariably a tiny fraction of the active power consumption if you're looking at anything built in the past few years. Anything with the Energy Star logo is required to draw <1W standby, compared with 200W or more for a large LCD set. Even with non-Energy-Star-certified plasma sets, they typically draw low single digit Watts. Either way, there's typically at least a factor of 100 difference in power consumption between standby power and active power consumption in most modern TVs.

So citation needed. Find me a recent TV that draws almost as much power when idle as it does when turned on. The backlight alone for an LCD set is between half and 2/3rds of its power consumption, so good luck.

Re:Why televisions, though?

[MobyDisk]

I call BS on the 60-100W figure. A quick Google search:

Modern televisions use only a small fraction of the power in standby mode (typically less than 10W). A modern HD LCD television may use only 1W or less when in standby mode (compared to 80W-125W during standard operation).

Various charts showing a range from 0W-16W

Energy Star requires power consumption of less than 1 watt in standby to qualify.

Re:Why televisions, though?

[Menkhaf]

There was. I even did a search for you. I can understand why you didn't do it yourself, I used an astounding THREE, not one, nor two, but three, search terms to find the article. "slashdot \"energy star\"".
Here you go: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/08/1322228

Have a nice weekend!