Big Screen TV's Suck. (Electricity.) 675 kW-hrs/yr. Kill your television

[NNadir]

"Not long ago, Andrew Fanara was shopping with his wife for a new big-screen television. Everything was going fine, until the sales clerk discovered Mr. Fanara was an energy watchdog for the federal government. Pulling Fanara aside, the clerk confessed: His own new 61-inch TV gulped electricity the way a big SUV guzzles gasoline.

"The month after he got it, he got a call from his landlord, who noticed a big jump in the utility bill," recalls Fanara, team leader of the Energy Star program at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). "It was the kid's big-screen television."

Revelations about energy-munching appliances aren't uncommon in Fanara's job. But lately, he's hearing more about big-screen TVs - and that's worrisome...

...Already, televisions account for about 4 percent of annual residential electricity use in the United States - enough to power all of the homes in the state of New York for a year, according to a new NRDC study. Today there are about 266 million TVs, and that number is growing by 3.5 million per year. By 2009, when half of all new TV sales are expected to be extended- or high-definition digital sets with big screens, TV energy use will reach about 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year nationwide - about 50 percent higher than at present...

...In its testing of big-screen TVs, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) used a two-minute clip of the hit comedy "Shrek." The results showed considerable variation in power use. Even similar size TVs could consume "drastically different amounts of power" in active mode, the report says. One 50-inch plasma high-definition TV (HDTV) was estimated to use 679 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. A 32-inch liquid-crystal display with HDTV capability was pegged at 387 kWh per year. By contrast, an older analog 34-inch TV was estimated to use just 209 kWh per year, NRDC tests found..."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20050616/ts_csm/stv_1

679 kilowatt-hours represents about 2.5 billion joules of energy. If coal powered power plants run at 30%, it means that such a television (ignoring transmission losses, etc) requires the burning of 300 kg of coal and the release of 1.2 tons of carbon dioxide. That's just one TV.

For comparison purposes, this same energy requirement represents the fissioning of 0.030 grams of uranium.

[havocmom]

1. Thanks for posting this info. Helps me with my personal battle against

those hideous things. Havocdad mentions them from time to time, noting the price is coming down a bit.

I hate the damned things. Life sized people on TV just further blurs the line between pretend and real for too many people. Hell, I still object to color TV x( for that reason.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Thanks so much for posting this. I am forwarding the article to everyone

I know who is running out to buy one of those huge screen TVs.

[hobbit709]

3. These figures don't

mean anything unless you know how long it is on per day, how many days a year, etc. Look at the amount of KW/year a refrigerator uses. A 75w light bulb, left on 24 hours a day uses 675 KW in a year. 675/yr is 56.25/mo. If 56 Kw/hr is that big a jump in your electric bill, you're sitting in the dark, either freezing or sweltering, and have about a 4 cu. ft. fridge.

[wakeme2008]

4. Do not forget your PC

I ran my 350Watt PC 24/7 and when it died, the next month I saw a big dip in my electric bill...

FYI...

[Massacure]

5. A 350 watt power supply doesn't mean your PC uses all that power.

A lot of PCs will slow the spin on their hard drive, turn the monitor off, etc... when not in use. Even when all the components are on full power you may not draw that much energy if you do not have enough parts too.

[Coastie for Truth]

6. LCD Computer Terminal

I work from home - in a home office. When I switched from a CRT monitor to an LCD monitor -- my electric bill went down by about $5.00 +/- a month.

The difference noted in

A 32-inch liquid-crystal display with HDTV capability was pegged at 387 kWh per year. By contrast, an older analog 34-inch TV was estimated to use just 209 kWh per year, NRDC tests found..."

of about 180 kwhr per year is probably due to the HDTV microprocessor (decode and map the signal to the screen).

[htuttle]

7. You're right

LCD screens do take much less power than CRTs.

You're probably right about the HDTV microprocessor. In light of that, consider the ramifactions of having HDTV become the new official broadcast standard by the end of 2006, and all the additional energy usage that will entail.

Seems like really bad timing...

[Coastie for Truth]

8. As to the energy demands of HDTV microprocessors

I believe in Moore's Law and in "Hennessey and Patterson" - and nVidia and Intel are just down the street (Montague Expwy) from me. So, I think we will see that problem solved.

[midnight armadillo]

9. The real question here...

...is WTF does a kid need a 61" TV for? Screens that big need to be really far away to make the image look right, and I suspect that a retail clerk who's renting doesn't have 15' from his TV to a couch in the kid's room.