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New Energy Efficiency Standards Take Effect This Week In the US (nrdc.org)
AmiMoJo writes: Eagerly awaited national energy efficiency standards for the little black boxes on the cords that connect many of our electronics--such as smartphones, computer laptops and electric toothbrushes--to wall outlets take effect this week. Known as external power supplies, or the less elegant term 'wall warts,' these power adapters may be small, but they consume a lot of energy. With 5 to 10 external power supplies in the average U.S. household, the new efficiency standards are projected to save consumers $300 million a year in electricity costs and reduce the carbon pollution that fuels dangerous climate change. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects that the new standards for external power supplies alone will cut nearly 47 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, equivalent to the annual electricity use of 6.5 million homes.
I never got why we never bothered making additional DC sockets for our homes, Where we wouldn't need these power bricks for every "Low Power" device.
I guess you could in theory have a power socket that allows USB too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So a savings of $300 million a year, divided among ~325 million people comes out to a little less than $1 per year. That's inconsequential. The pollution savings are significant, but too abstract for the common person to understand. Knowing the American people, I doubt that anyone cares; am I being too cynical?
Either way, it's a worthy change, and I hope to see more like this.
So, you're basically saying that we should dedicate a human to manually do a job that a chip could do trivially. Great.
I, for one, would like my electronics to do their charging quickly, efficiently, and without my having to babysit them.
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...save consumers $300 million a year in electricity costs...
So $1/year/person. In other words, no savings to speak of.
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Why bother, when this problem could be resolved by the free market. I mean, who'd want to buy a power supply that constantly drains power even when it's off? This would only make sense if you assume the average consumer is an idiot.
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And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
I know a guy who plugs his phone in at night then turns the powerstrip off its pluged into to save energy.
Then he wonders why his phone isn't charged in the morning.
Lets not do that.
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So, obviously you don't like him enough to tell him. :-P
Cruel, but funny.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Saves $300 million a year.
So... about a dollar each.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Lazyness is only part of the equation. Cheap manufacturers that don't give consumers a choice are another part.
More government intervention, because consumers ARE STUPID. Plug all your stupid wall warts into a power strip, when you get done charging, turn off the power strip. Idiots...now another stupid regulation.
So I should waste my time monitoring devices that were designed poorly in the first place? THAT is stupid. If we need a regulation to get companies to design products that aren't needlessly wasteful then so be it. Fixing market failures is actually a good use of government.
LOL, oh yeah ... who built them? What's that you say, Capitalists who didn't give a damn about anything but their bottom line?
Companies make 'em and sell 'em, chances are the average consumer isn't even aware of the issue ... and your "market" doesn't give a damn, because it's built on the idea of short term benefit.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe corporations would do this without some external impetus. Assuming rational consumers making good choices based on perfect information? Yeah, the unicorns really work there.
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"Stop government regulation! It's so much easier to design without worrying about electrocuting people, or outgassing volatile compounds, or irradiating people!" . . . . No thanks. Safety regulations and "truth in labeling" are some of the few places where government actually belongs. And since wasting energy is directly connected to a smokestack in most parts of the country, saving energy promotes safety.
Why bother, when this problem could be resolved by the free market.
The "free market" has utterly failed to solve this problem to date. QED your faith in the free market to solve all problems is misplaced.
I mean, who'd want to buy a power supply that constantly drains power even when it's off?
No one but you are implying that there is a choice. Many of these power supplies are designed to be as cheap as possible and/or badly designed. If I buy a TiVo or a router it's not as if I have a choice of what power supply it comes with. Companies that sell these things do not care AT ALL about your home or office electricity budget because they have no financial or regulatory incentive to care. This is called a market failure. The pure self interest of the companies making the product conflicts with the need to minimize power consumption.
This would only make sense if you assume the average consumer is an idiot.
Has nothing to do with the intellect of the consumer. The consumer isn't being given a choice and even if they were it's not clear they would choose to buy something that minimizes power consumption even though that is in our best interest as a society.
What an idiotic comment. So I should have to turn off and turn on every device I own twice? And I can't use a remote to turn anything on anymore? And what about the efficiency while I'm using the device?
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I came up with the same $1. But they also said it's the equivalent of 6.5M homes - which is 5% of homes (~125M households in the us). I find it hard to believe that the average annual electric bill is $50 ($20/pp x 2.5ppl/household). Something in that summary is screwy.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This is an example of the very common "Principal-Agent Problem" which exists in some form in many, many commercial products and services. Manufacturers and service providers make decisions in effect for consumer that benefit their bottom line, but pass on all sorts of costs to consumers as a result.
In this case cheap energy-wasteful wall-warts that reduce the manufacturer cost but adds to everyone's electricity bill. Market competition does not address this issue since purveyors of electronics are not using "wall-wart power efficiency" in their sales campaigns, or even reveal how much power they waste if the consumer wants to find out (you have to buy it and see).
Only regulation by an organization that acts in the interests of the consumer can address this.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I thought the same thing too, but then I realized they were talking about 30 years of use compared to a single year worth of electricity for 6.5M homes.
I doubt even the $300 million figure is true.
I can't remember the last charger type device that I've seen drain any measurable power when not in use.
I ran a kill-a-watt behind my surge protector. The surge protector had the following:
Nintendo DS charger, Nintendo DSi charger. Nintendo DS Lite charger. Proprietary cell phone charger. Mini USB charger. Micro USB charger.
After a week, these alleged "vampire" devices had consumed a flat fucking 0.00 kWh. The idea that we need to do something about these "vampires" is ridiculous and a prime example of "penny wise, pound foolish". It makes even less sense than telling Californians to conserve water at home while they grow fucking almonds and grapes in the fields.
I do believe there are shitty devices which drain power needlessly, but that's the problem of whoever buys it, and it's a self-correcting problem. Let them pay for it on their power bill, or let them choose to buy something better. If you believe people are idiots and that will never happen, do it directly:
1: Stop burning coal. ...
2: Tax burning coal.
3: Stop burning coal to generate electricity.
4: Tax burning coal to generate electricity.
5: Tax burning coal to deliver electricity.
467: Legislate power efficiency ratings and requirements for trivial, drop-in-the ocean shit like this.
hrm ... normally a Wikipedia fan in the economics section, but this is a little too simplistic.
Market failures are typcially held to be scenarios where the market cannot achieve a solution - not ones where Pareto efficiency hasn't [yet] been achieved.
Interestingly enough, many regulators cite market failure where regulations prevent market solutions from being offered. e.g. Nuclear energy insurance. Beware of their circular reasoning.
Personally when I buy computer PSU's I look for 85+ Bronze or whatever rating term they're using. I'm not sure who adminsters the seal, but something like UL for efficiency ratings on wall warts is entirely feasible. I'd certainly look at an efficiency claim on my next razor before purchasing - I spent an extra $30 on the last one to get the Li+ model for similar reasons.
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The math in the summary ($300million savings, equal to 6.5 million homes) seems to indicate the average home's yearly electrical cost is less than $50 .
I can has one of these?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Great. Any advice for dealing with devices that are never done charging? Off the top of my head for stuff in my own home:
- Multiple USB hubs
- Multiple hard drives
- Home security camera
- Printer
All of those are always-on and use wall warts to draw power. I'm confident I could double that list (at least) if I did a walkthrough of my home. Your suggestion does nothing to address always-on devices, which, arguably, are the larger concern here. Regulations that require better efficiency do address always-on devices, and they do so in a major way.
There are a LOT of words, and some punctuation, between the clauses "$300 million a year in electricity costs" and "6.5 million homes."
Those words probably mean something...
=Smidge=
So $1/year/person. In other words, no savings to speak of.
You can always count on the amateur capitalist to neglect to fully prorate the costs of a thing before proclaiming its worth. Of course, if it were a proposed $1/year/person tax they'd be howling as if you'd stolen their first-born.
We could demand by government fiat that wall warts be more efficient and reduce our carbon output or we could use nuclear power and eliminate it. I suggest we use nuclear power.
If we use technology like a waste annihilating molten salt reactor we could eliminate the carbon emitted from electricity production, burn up the nuclear waste from old solid fuel reactors, and get some very valuable medical and industrial isotopes.
The only reason we haven't seen reactors like this already is because the federal government has decided that they alone have the authority to manage nuclear materials, and that the people that license these nuclear facilities are so risk adverse that they'd rather see everyone in the world suffer and die from a carbon dioxide induced environmental collapse than have someone get on the news for having bumped their head while working on something "nukular".
The federal government created this problem, I have little faith that they will fix it.
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I think you are confused. The broken-window fallacy exposes the flawed reasoning behind the notion that waste benefits the economy by creating work. Arguing in support of wasteful, inefficient electronic devices (and not the opposite) would be an example of such a fallacy.
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(source)(pdf). Sure, the wall wart is small potatoes. Lots of these items are small bits individually, and they all have to pass a cost/benefit test (the cost of the incremental improvement must be less than the financial savings). When you add up all the bits and bobs, the cumulative impact is significant. It's not like DOE started with wall warts. It focused initially on the biggest opportunities, and works its way down the list. It's only because /.ers have lots more wall warts than the common man that it's even newsworthy for us.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
When the U.S. president says "millions of dollars" you just know he's not discussing foreign policy. He probably shouldn't be allowed to wield that word at all.
Sorry, Mr President, "billions" is as low as you're allowed to go for dollars; you'll have to save that for talking about "ounces"—even if "this grand initiative will save America $0.3 billion annually" doesn't make it sound like we're paying off the last war any time soon.
Come to think of it, if the president was confined to "trillions" (for the sake of uniformity) that wouldn't be a bad thing, either—even if the average America loses count when first hearing "this grand initiative will save America $0.0003 trillion annually." Obama in eight years has presided over something like $30 trillion in total state expenditure. For his substantive purposes, trillions are a perfectly good unit every day of the week, and all speechifying occasions.
Go out to Amazon and start looking closely at adapters, chargers and lights. A shocking number of items have obviously fake Under Writers Laboratory marks. Outside well known US and Major Asian Brands (Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Samsung, LG) I'm dubious that the devices will be compliant.
Well, if this is $300 net, I'll take it. That's how economics works, doesn't it? You stop investing when the marginal return for a dollar spent is a dollar.
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Cheap manufacturers that don't give consumers a choice are another part
Ahh, but you fail to realize "cheap" is the choice of consumers, not the manufacturers. Manufacturers are just responding to the demand.
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That's just the saving on the supply of electricity. How much is preventing more than 1.5m tonnes of CO2/year being emitted, plus the other pollution, worth?
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So true. A couple of years ago, I bought a wattmeter and measured pretty much everything. The result was incredible : while my LCD screen would switch from ~30 to 0.05 watts when in standby (with the LED yellow), my USB external drive would only go from 14 to 9 Watts ... when the power button was on "0".
Yes, a physical switch that makes you believe that the power is completely off (no noise no light) was actually only controlling the standby state of the drive, leaking 9 watts when powered off ! That should be illegal.
And its supposed to record all your shows while you're not home switched off and unplugged right? Most all stbs today have an auto off set by default if its not set you can set it up yourself.
The last time I put a power meter on a set top box, the difference in power between "On", and "standby" was negligible. They were huge power hogs, even when "off".
Of course you can't just switch off the power bar or unplug them. In addition to missing any recordings, they can take a long time after a power cycle to be ready, if they re-download the programming guide, etc.
The cable boxes I have experience with have an "OFF" on the remote, and also on the front panel. In the "OFF" condition, the LED display turns off, and the box's dissipation goes from 21 W to 20.5 W, typically. This is worse than ineffective, it's dishonest.
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I look forward to personally saving $300M next year in electricity. Oh, you meant totally? Well, you are only saving me a buck, less than a penny every three days.
Like other climate solutions, I expect this to cause more climate harm than it is meant to mitigate.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Your solution is a poor one, ill-conceived, inefficient, and poorly directed. Pollution comes from the power generator, and the power generating company should be taxed at a rate equal to the demonstrable damage the pollution causes. This should give electric companies more incentive to tell their customers not to waste.
Of course, if the utility is state-owned, this nice mechanism disappears; the state is not going to tax itself for polluting or for any other misbehavior. Another reason to minimize government.
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Back in the day hospitals were full of lawnmower injuries until consumers got annoyed enough to tell governments to force lawnmower manufacturers to change their designs. Government regulation is often a "choice of consumers" as well. In a competitive market sometimes all manufacturers of a product sometimes make something the customer does not want because that's what everyone else is making. Without minimum standards you end up with 1980s Chinese quality and safety features.
LOL, oh yeah ... who built them? What's that you say, Capitalists who didn't give a damn about anything but their bottom line?
Companies make 'em and sell 'em, chances are the average consumer isn't even aware of the issue ... and your "market" doesn't give a damn, because it's built on the idea of short term benefit.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe corporations would do this without some external impetus. Assuming rational consumers making good choices based on perfect information? Yeah, the unicorns really work there.
I think this is a BS problem. Cellphones need 5volts. To have 5v, and have isolation, you need a step-down transformer and a switching dc converter power chip or a potentially more dangerous direct connect switching power source alone.
If you opt for the dollar store power charger, these use a switching dc supply converter, often, one side (wire) of these devices is directly connected to the power line, These latter devices are very efficient, matching on-time to cell phone battery demand. To be safe, the direct wire is supposed to be the ground lead. But be sure your source is properly wired.
Want to improve efficiency? Charge your cellphone with a solar device.
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