![]() “We're moving from an electromechanical world that's on and off to an electronic world that's never off,” he says. Added up on a nationwide or global scale, Dr Meier realised, the wasted energy must be staggering. The convenience of being able to switch on your television from the sofa using a remote control, in short, has a cost, since some circuits in the television must remain active, watching for signals from the remote control. In the 1990s he noticed a proliferation in the number of household appliances that are never fully switched off, but spend most of the time in a standby mode, ready to spring into action when needed. This is due in no small part to the efforts of Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( LBNL) in Berkeley, California. On January 1st the California Energy Commission introduced mandatory standby requirements for various electronic devices-the first such obligatory regulations in the world. ![]() Moves are being made around the world to reduce this unnecessary power consumption, called “standby power”.Īs in many other areas of environmental policy, the state of California is leading the way. And they are not alone: many other devices, such as televisions, DVD players, stereos and computers also spend much of their lives in standby mode, collectively consuming a huge amount of energy. ![]() For while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idle-in “standby” mode-more than 99% of the time. STRANGE though it seems, a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. ![]()
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