California Moving Forward With Big-Screen TV Power Restrictions

Hugh Pickens writes "The Los Angeles Times reports that California regulators are poised to pass the nation's first ban on energy-hungry big-screen televisions just as they did with refrigerators, air conditioners and dozens of other products since the 1970s. 'We would not propose TV efficiency standards if we thought there was any evidence in the record that they will hurt the economy,' said Commissioner Julia Levin, who has been in charge of the two-year rule-making procedure. 'This will actually save consumers money and help the California economy grow and create new clean, sustainable jobs.' California's estimated 35 million TVs and related electronic devices account for about 10% of all household electricity consumption, but manufacturers quickly are coming up with new technologies that are making even 50-inch-screen models much more economical to operate. Sets with screens of up to 58 inches would have until the start of 2011 to comply with a minimum efficiency standard, with more stringent rules being introduced two years later. If all TVs met state standards, California could avoid the $600-million cost of building a natural-gas-fired power plant, says Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer. Switching to more-efficient TVs could have an estimated net benefit to the state of $8.1 billion, the commission staff reported."

Comments

Accelerated OLED panel development?

[MtViewGuy]

I think this new law could fast-track the development of larger OLED flat panel TV's.

Since OLED's don't need backlighting, by definition it means very efficient power usage even on flat panel TV's over 50" in size. Don't be surprised that LG, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony start pouring in billions of dollars in R&D to overcome the current technical issues and get these larger OLED flat panel TV's into production by 2012 at latest. And unlike LCD TVs, OLED TVs will have extremely fast response times, which means no motion blurring issues even with fast action scenes.

Re:If it's only a few bucks more, we win!

[TheRaven64]

The problem is why this needs to be legislated. If buying the more efficient TV will save you money, then what's the problem? Instead of this kind of micromanaging, why not enact something like the law we have on this side of the pond which requires electrical goods to be sold with a sticker indicating their energy efficiency rating, which can be used to calculate the total cost of ownership quite easily. You could take this a step further and require each item to be labeled with the cost (at the current electricity cost) of operating it for an hour and for the number of hours it is typically operated in one year.

Re:Misses The Point

[apoc.famine]

You're part correct, but part grossly wrong.
 
I grew up in the mountains of Vermont and NH, and it's NOT the greens who are against putting turbines in the hills. It's the average joe who lives in a town around where they want to put them that's firmly against them. The reasons:
 
a) That's traditional stomping grounds for many. Hunting, hiking, etc.
b) We like our pristine, forest covered hills. We hate the power-line cuts which mar lots of the hills already, and we hate the ski areas which do as well. This would be another "slash a road up the side of a mountain, then clearcut chunks of it.
c) It might cost us jobs. VT and NH make tons of money off tourism. People come to see the unspoiled (after we spent 150 years growing it back from the clearcutting) forests and beautiful, trackless hills. If our local hills get a wind farm on them, that tourism money goes to some other town.
d) The corporations planning on wind farms are doing it behind the backs of the people that live there. Not asking them, not telling them anything. The first they know about it is that there are some folks from NYC or Boston surveying a mountain in their backyard. After the appropriate amount of outrage, the corporation holds a town-hall meeting where they lay out their plan to hack up the woods and stick towers up and fence parts of it off, and then act surprised when most of the people who live there don't support them.
 
Yes, the ultra-green group is irritating, and stops all sort of progress. But in the NE, it's generally not the greens who are the problem. It's the average citizen who's getting shafted by some corporation that forms the bulk of the opposition to new power generation plants.
 
Nobody likes it when some corporation from out of state comes in, whacks a bunch of trees down, and slaps a structure in. The corporations don't bother pitching it to the locals, they just assume that they can do whatever the fuck they want, wherever they want to do it. I watched this happen in the town next to where I grew up, where I used to go hunting. The plan was to close off the mountain, hack a road up it, and clearcut for a windfarm. The first the locals heard about it was when someone stumbled across the environmental impact statement buried on the state website. The people who surveyed the mountain came in from the back side, and never set foot in the town.
 
Yes, green power might be good, but when the corporation who does it is just another sneaky, fuck the consumers and citizens corporation, it doesn't matter. For a lot of the people in the NE, a power corporation is a power corporation, no matter if it's oil, nuclear, or wind. They're all just a bunch of lying, money grubbing, citizen-screwing, faceless corporations.