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

I Did Not!

[Hugh Pickens]

Hugh Pickens writes

I most certainly did not!

Misses The Point

[Raisey-raison]

We do need to think about our future energy needs both with respect to the environment and energy security. What we don't need is silly government micro management of our lives. So yes that means we need to subsidize nuclear, wind and solar power. The problem is that the greenies block everything. They block nuclear energy and they even block solar energy. Diane Feinstein plans on banning solar panels in the Mojave Desert even though that is one of the best places for them. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/20/MN4T19OTBJ.DTL And then the greenies don't want to allow wind power on mountains in Vermont and New Hampshire even though no-one lives on the top of a mountain. They dig their heads on the sand and pretend that with a growing population we can just conserve our way out of this crisis - which is of course way out of reality. Then they try to impose draconian restrictions on the rest of us. I can just imagine the next step - banning video games because of energy use.

Re:Misses The Point

[node 3]

They dig their heads on the sand and pretend that with a growing population we can just conserve our way out of this crisis

And to dig your head in the sand and pretend that with a growing population we can just consume our way out of this crisis is any better?

Then they try to impose draconian restrictions on the rest of us.

"Oh no! They're going to outlaw low efficiency TVs when higher efficiency TVs exist!"

The hyperbolic stance of you and your ilk is just as much a problem, perhaps even more so, as the people who oppose any sort of new energy plant. We will need to increase energy production, there's no doubt about that, but we also need to make better use of the energy we already have, there's no doubt about that, either.

So quit being part of the problem. Just because you call out the foolishness from the other side of the debate doesn't excuse *your* foolishness.

Re:Misses The Point

[clarkkent09]

It's like anything else, as the energy becomes less available the price goes up and the consumption goes down. Since the gov in that state is already so heavily involved in the energy industry as in every other aspect of life, its hard to take it out overnight but a good first step would be to stop dreaming up inane regulations like this. At least increase taxes on energy so that those who use more have to pay more. What difference does it make if they use it by having an inefficient tv (illegal) or by leaving it on twice as long (legal)?

Re:Misses The Point

[Shakrai]

"Oh no! They're going to outlaw low efficiency TVs when higher efficiency TVs exist!"

I don't really give a damn about TV because I rarely watch it. What does bother me is the fact that the Government is going to mandate that I switch to crappy ass light bulbs that take half a minute to come up to full brightness and will contaminate my house with mercury if dropped.

The CFL mandate is one of the stupidest fucking things ever to come out of Washington. I'm already using them at every location in my house where it makes sense to use them -- i.e: lights that get turned on left on for hours on end. Now they are going to force me to use them in closets (where I need full brightness at once and rarely leave the light on for more than a minute or two) and all other locations? WTF?

As an added bonus, there isn't a single CFL made in the United States. There are still incandescent bulbs produced here. Thank you Uncle Sam, for removing my choice to support American jobs and ensuring that even more of our money leaves the country and goes to China.

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.

Re:Misses The Point

[bcrowell]

What does bother me is the fact that the Government is going to mandate that I switch to crappy ass light bulbs that take half a minute to come up to full brightness [...]

I don't know where you get your compact fluorescents, but mine come on immediately, and I don't notice any delay before they're at full brigtness. Maybe you just need to buy newer ones that have the latest high-tech solid-state ballasts.

[...] and will contaminate my house with mercury if dropped.

(a) Liquid mercury is harmless unless ingested. (b) If you drop one, sweep it up. (c) The amount of mercury in one bulb is a few milligrams. That's small compared to a mercury thermometer, but I don't hear you complaining about mercury thermometers. (d) The wikipedia article shows that the environmental aspect of this is FUD: "In areas with coal-fired power stations, the use of CFLs saves on mercury emissions when compared to the use of incandescent bulbs. This is due to the reduced electrical power demand, reducing in turn the amount of mercury released by coal as it is burned.[43][44]. In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 tons) that year.[45]"

If you want to oppose government regulation on general political principles, that's one thing, but please don't oppose it based on FUD.

As an added bonus, there isn't a single CFL made in the United States. There are still incandescent bulbs produced here. Thank you Uncle Sam, for removing my choice to support American jobs and ensuring that even more of our money leaves the country and goes to China.

How about being a little more consistent here? If you use energy-inefficient technologies, it affects my life with pollution and global warming. If you think you have a god-given right to do that, then essentially you're saying you think you have a god-given right to have me subsidize the hidden costs of your lifestyle. In other words, you want a government subsidy. So on the one hand, you seem to be all fired up about how evil government regulation is, but then you turn around and say that you want government subsidies for your polluting lifestyle, and government subsidies for obsolete US industries that can't adapt to new technologies.

Re:Create More Hobs ???

[Entropy98]

Where are the jobs going to be created? Best Buy and Walmart. Considering all TVs are now designed and produced overseas I can't see were any jobs would be created?

TV efficiency testers?

A Government that can...

[rshol]

...tell you how much electricity your TV set can use or how much water your toilet can use per flush, has the power to do anything.

how about doing something about cable / sat boxes

[Joe The Dragon]

how about doing something about cable / sat boxes as well? Why can't they go into a lower power mode / HD spin down when off / not recording something?

Re:Create More Hobs ???

[AliasMarlowe]

Where are the jobs going to be created? Best Buy and Walmart. Considering all TVs are now designed and produced overseas I can't see were any jobs would be created?

Writing regulations, testing for compliance with regulations, putting amusing stickers on compliant units, smuggling noncompliant units into the country, putting forged stickers on noncompliant units, legal actions for flouting regulations, building bigger prisons for incarcerating those who flout the laws, lots of prison guards, parole officers, etc.

All the things the US excels in!

Re:Idiots

[fredjh]

The problem is that California is so large, manufacturers are not going to make a CA TV and a rest-of-the-world TV; neither will they stop selling there.

So, the problem is that even if the TV ends up costing only a few dollars more, it costs a few dollars more for EVERYONE.

Seems like the wrong approach.

[blind biker]

Mandating low consumption TV sets, or low consumption lightbulbs (here in Finland it's now forbidden to produce incandescent bulbs) is as dumb as mandating low consumption cars. It makes the whole process of enforcement and monitoring more complicated, more expensive and prone to corruption.

The logical and simpler solution is to increase the price of electricity and/or gasoline, to reflect the real cost of the commodity, through taxes. That way, there is a natural economic pressure to decrease the consumption of EVERY appliance. And if someone has the money to pay for the electricity consumed by his/her CRT TV, then let them. Their money can be used to find better sources of abovementioned commodities. I.E. invest in research of algae-produced combustibles.

Re:Seems like the wrong approach.

[polar red]

The logical and simpler solution is to increase the price of electricity and/or gasoline, to reflect the real cost of the commodity, through taxes

hey Einstein, how is the consumer going to know how much that shiny new fridge is going to consume ? Without government intervention, he won't be able to tell the difference between a high and a low efficient device ...

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.

The Governator...

[MindPrison]

...is BACK,

and he saw himself on a 50 inch TV and thought - "too much detail", ban all 50" inch TV's, I got to look good on TV.
(Spoken with Arnoldish accent of course) ;)

Re:Idiots

[Bj�rn]

If so, then it will also save emery for everyone, resulting in cheaper energy bills, as well as reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and associated costs.

Re:Idiots

[jcorno]

Glad i don't live there. ( and hope their stupidity doesn't spread ).

The economics of this situation is more complicated than "costs more money = bad." People don't take energy efficiency into account when they make a big purchase like this. That means it's in the best interest of the manufacturer to save 5 bucks on manufacturing costs, even it means an extra $100 in electricity bills for the consumer. Legislation is the only really effective way to balance out the costs in a case like this, unless you can figure out how to make people pay for the electricity up front.

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:Idiots

[pommiekiwifruit]

The problem is that California is so large, manufacturers are not going to make a CA TV and a rest-of-the-world TV;

They do that already for the USA - they make NTSC only 110volt only televisions with crappy connectors for sale in the USA, and NTSC/PAL/PAL60 televisions 100-250volt power with RGB SCART connectors for countries that like colours to be the same from time to time.

(We have to specially import US specification televisions to check how it murders our games' artwork when played over there, and adjust the source artwork to avoid red and yellow).

Perhaps with HDTV they will standardise the models a little more, but it may not be as widespread as you think.

Re:Create More Hobs ???

[mspohr]

Due to energy saving mandates and regulations like this new proposal, California has managed to keep per capita electricity consumption flat (no increase) since 1973 while the rest of the country has doubled per capita usage during the same period. This is a big win for everyone in California and keeps us on the cutting edge of environment and energy policy as well as lowering the costs for everyone in the state.

1. Energy efficiency regulations.

2. ????

3. Profit!

Please don't move to California and screw it up.

An alternative but just _crazy_ idea.

[RightSaidFred99]

I've been kicking around this theory. I think I'll unveil it on SlashDot first, then maybe go for wider publication and peer validation. It could revolutionize _everything_.

OK, stick with me. What if... man I'm sweating about this, it's so monumental. OK, hold it together RightSaidFred99, hold it together.

Ready. OK. What if we charge more for goods and services, including power delivery, when we have an interest in seeing those goods and services used less. I think this came to me in a fevered peyote dream or something, but I am willing to bet (just a small amount of money - it's only a theory) that if California raised the price of power just a little bit that usage would go down. They could find the "sweet spot" (new term I coined) between price and availability of the resource and find some sort of balance.

Now the really crazy thing about this radical, revolutionary, mind-blowing idea of raising the price to quell demand is that it affects not only large TVs but _everything_! It might make people turn off their lights and lower their utilization of other power-using appliances!