They also serve who only stand and wait

What if we could reduce carbon dioxide emissions and cut electricity bills without adding any cost to consumer electronics? Oh, and what if we could cut down the size of the ginormous "wall warts" clogging up spike bars across the globe?

This is the promise of a global initiative to cut down on standby power. Standby power is the current drawn by devices which are switched "off"where "off" means a low-power state in which the device is not performing its primary function.

This is power used when a television set is switched off, but waits in silence for the code from a remote control that will cause it to spring to life once more. It's the power used by the clock on the microwave oven, the red LED glowing on your home stereo, and the power brick on the cell phone chargereven when no phone is attached.

Some of these devices are well-engineered and consume only milliwatts of power when waiting for commands, but most are not. They can suck up 30W or more even when idle or "off." Modern devices pull power from the mains 24 hours a day, year-round, and even when switched off, external AC/DC power supplies never stop drawing power.

Paying for this largely wasted energy won't bankrupt a household, but when multiplied by all the households in a country or continent, the numbers get real big, real fast. But unlike many other problems we face, this is a solvable one. In fact, it's already been solved; electrical engineers have the tools to save nations like the US billions of dollars annually and to reduce greenhouse gases while they're at it. The best news? The changes will cost almost nothing to implement.

That's a proposition that manufacturers, environmentalists, economists, governments, and consumers can all embrace, and they have. But there's still a long way to go.

The wheel in the sky keeps on turning

Just try to stop the wheel on your electric meter. Day and night it turns in silence, spinning out the record of your electricity use, and it mocks your attempts to bring it to a halt.

It wasn't always this way. A few decades back, it was simple enough to wander through a house flipping off switches. When all devices were off and the refrigerator was unplugged, the electric meter stopped, killed by the lack of power flowing into the house.

This state of complete electrical isolation is unknown to most modern homeowners, whose meters spin endlessly. Every TV, stereo, light, computer, and washing machine can be switched off, but the meter will continue to spin. Disconnect the growing number of devices (set-top boxes, routers) never meant to be switched offstill spinning, Pull the plug on the fridgestill spinning.

The only reliable way to stop the wheel is to unplug (not switch off) every device in the house. Most modern devices use AC/DC adapters with transformers that consume power even in a no-load state (when the device they are attached to is not drawing any current), which is why power bricks are warm to the touch even when disconnected from their devices.

This is one sort of standby power; another is the power used when devices are switched on but are in a low-power state, waiting for user action. Laser printers that aren't currently printing, for instance, enter a low power mode until called they need to print another sheet.

These states are beneficial; without them, printers and other devices would use massive amounts of power each year. But they still cost money and they still draw power. That power draw can be significant. The International Energy Agency looked into the issue a few years back and found that VCRs could draw from 5W to 19W while in standby, cable boxes from 8W to 14W, and fax machines could suck up anywhere from 5W to 30W.

Nothing quite as wonderful as (saving) money

All that power adds up. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that standby power accounts for 1.5 percent of OECD member countries' residential electricity use. This is only an average, though; highly industrialized and wealthy countries like Germany have a much higher number, about 4 percent. That's 20 terawatt hours (TWh) of "wasted" electricity each year in just one country.

Over the course of a device's lifetime, the cost of all that standby power can actually exceed the cost of having the device on. The IEA estimates that each watt shaved from a unit's standby power measurement will save buyers $3 to $8 over the course of that product's life.

Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who helped to spur much of the international attention on standby power in the mid-1990s, calculates that products can save an average of 3 watts through relatively simple reengineering. At government electricity prices, this comes out to a $10 average lifetime savings. When a government buys millions of products a year, this is more than pocket change.

Those millions are only saved if the cost of the devices in question stays the same. Fortunately, Meier estimates that simple but substantial improvements cost nothing in consumer electronics. For other products, the cost may be up to a dollar a devicean excellent investment.

It makes such good sense that George Bush directed the entire federal government to buy low-standby-power devices back in July, 2001. His executive order instructed agencies to "purchase products that use no more than one watt in their standby power consuming mode." Because the federal government is one of the largest purchasing organizations in the world, this is a directive that carries serious weight in the industry. The government's leverage over manufacturers means that more efficient devices will be offered not just to government, but to the public as well.

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