By 2011, greener screens in Golden State By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 27, 2009
Nick Canzoneri weighed several factors when he went shopping for a new flat-screen TV at the Best Buy in Gaithersburg earlier this week. He wanted the right brand ("Sony. I've had one for 20 years. I tend to stick with what I like . . .") and the right price. Size mattered, too. Canzoneri's son talked him into the enormous 52-inch model he was trying to wedge into his Toyota sedan.
Suffice to say, environmental considerations weren't at the top of Canzoneri's list.
Soon, they might be.
Those big, bright flat-panel TVs suck down far more power than the puny cathode-ray tube TVs they're rapidly replacing. Which is why regulators and environmentalists -- who usually reserve their passion for shrinking rain forests, melting glaciers and gas-guzzling SUVs -- are turning their attention to the once-humble TV set.
Last week, after two years of debate and study, California became the first state to challenge America's heretofore unquestioned love affair with its TV set. A state panel established the nation's first energy-consumption limits for TVs up to 58 inches wide. Regulations for larger sets will be phased in later. The new rules do not affect TVs for sale now, but they will require TVs sold in California to use about a third less power by 2011 and about half as much by 2013. TVs that can't meet the standards would be banned from sale in California, which accounts for 10 percent of the 35 million new TVs sold in America every year.
The prospect of the government messing with its citizens' God-given right to a super-size TV turned what might have been a mundane regulatory proceeding into a shot heard around the world. At least three other states (Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts) and two national governments (Canada and Australia) then said they, too, would consider energy limits.
Television has long been accused of being a cultural polluter, but the California Energy Commission's move touched off debate about how much our national TV habit has contributed to fouling the physical environment as well.
The energy commission estimated that TVs account for 10 percent of household electrical use in the state, once "related devices" like digital recorders and game consoles are included. But the Consumer Electronics Association, which opposed the new rules, says that figure is misleading since it covers all of a household's electronic devices, from iPods to computers. The Arlington-based trade group estimates that the TV alone accounts for no more than 3 percent of a family's monthly power bill.
Further, the group warns that the new regulations could raise prices, limit consumer choice and stifle innovation not just in California, but nationwide, as manufacturers redesign their products to comply with the state's new law. The most vulnerable may be power-hungry big-screen models, sets that use the less efficient plasma technology, and a new generation of TVs that offer 3-D picture or combine the functions of a TV and a personal computer.
"It's not this generation of TVs that you have to be concerned about, it's the multi-function TVs of tomorrow," says Jason Oxman, the Consumer Electronics Association's senior vice president of industry affairs.
What's more, the new regulations include technical requirements that could prompt a costly overhaul in TV designs, says Jon Fairhurst, a manager for Sharp Labs, the U.S.-based research arm of the Japanese set manufacturer. To save power, he says, new TVs would have to turn off automatically when attached to a DVD player that is turned off, something no TV does now.
"As far as I know, there are no TVs that pass the standard," Fairhurst says.
State officials and environmentalists say it's about time that TVs followed other appliances whose energy use is regulated, from air conditioners to hot-water heaters. Powering down the set will not only save consumers money (roughly $8 billion over 10 years, or about $31 per household annually, according to a state report), but it will eliminate tons of greenhouse gases that otherwise would be generated by power plants.
Without the regulation, the state would need to build a $3 billion power plant to keep up with demand, the state commission says.
"Whether it's refrigerators or TV sets, anytime anyone has proposed regulation, the rallying cry is always the same: 'This will stifle innovation,' " says Noah Horowitz, senior scientist of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group. "Well, refrigerators are far bigger today, they have more features, and they use one-quarter of the power they did 25 years ago."
Hundreds of TVs already comply with the 2011 and 2013 standards, says Horowitz, and squeezing efficiencies out of noncompliant models won't be hard or expensive. Photo sensors that automatically adjust brightness and contrast based on ambient light add little to the cost of a new set, he says.
Vizio, a leading HDTV manufacturer based in Irvine, Calif., will have no trouble complying with the state standards by 2011, says Ken Lowe, a vice president and co-founder. This includes the company's largest set, a 55-inch model. "If little old Vizio can do it, I'm sure the bigger guys can do it, too," he says.
The irony of California's action is that it comes in the home state of the movie and television industries, which have their own concerns about the regulations. The Digital Entertainment Group, a nonprofit organization that represents 70 Hollywood studios and DVD manufacturers, has called them "arbitrary and inflexible limits" that could impede the introduction of new digital products.
The Hollywood group, like the manufacturers association, says that if consumers want energy-efficient TVs, they can find them now. Most manufacturers submit their products for review to the Energy Star program, which flags the most efficient appliances, including flat-screen TVs. The program, run in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, has power standards similar to California's new limits. The difference is, Energy Star's standards are voluntary.
Either way, choosing a new TV could soon come down to more than price, brand, size and picture quality. As he puzzled over how to get his humongous Sony Bravia home the other day, Nick Canzoneri acknowledged that it may be time to start paying attention to the underlying cost of vegging out in front of the set: "Electricity isn't cheap, and it isn't getting any cheaper."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/26/AR2009112602164.htmlGiven our TV habits, what we need is a big, flat, green screen By Curt Suplee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Watts up, Doc? They certainly are, thanks to the increased power demands of today's supersized flat-screen TVs. And that worries energy sentinels. So a couple of weeks ago California -- continuing in its role as the national Trendinator -- issued new efficiency standards mandating that by 2011 all TV sets with a display size smaller than Mount Rushmore must use 33 percent less energy to be legal for sale. In practical terms, this new television rule probably means the entire U.S. market will shift accordingly.
That's a good thing, and it could have a significant impact. But it's no reason to demonize the technology. Never mind hysterical news reports about the new regs, which described flat-screen TVs as "energy hogs" and "major power guzzlers." Somebody needs to switch to decaf. A 25-inch "tube" TV, the sort most of us watched for years, uses about 100 watts. Today, an average 47-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) TV consumes around 200. That difference, in itself, isn't exactly going to drain the power grid. Even monster plasma screens that need 400 to 500 watts aren't profligate per se. In fact, viewed solely in terms of cost per square inch, a set that uses four times as much energy as a 25-inch tube but produces an image more than four times larger is actually more efficient. As you might expect with TV, it all depends on how you look at it. (And if you're looking at screen sizes above 58 inches, the new California rules don't apply. Size matters.)
That doesn't mean TVs shouldn't be improved. But the trouble, as they used to say, is not in your set. It's in us. Americans now spend a record 151 hours a month watching TV, and the average household has 2.6 sets on the premises -- one per person. Plus, these sets are tricked out with all sorts of gaming gadgets such as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, each of which draws something like 200 watts -- as much power as or even more than a 47-inch LCD itself. Throw in a Wii or two, a DVR and a sound system, and pretty soon your family-room energy demand is about the same as a strip mall's. Blaming TV wattage for this state of affairs is like blaming the national fat boom on Twinkies and potato chips.
For many households, TVs and their outriggers now account for fully 10 percent of total electric consumption, up from 3 percent in the 1980s. Sure, that's still only $8 to $12 a month -- a modest sum compared with the $30 monthly national average cable bill. But the new TV standard is not about saving money. It's about avoiding the need for more power plants and thus more schmutz in the air.
From that perspective, even a small efficiency increase can make a difference, especially in watt-conscious California, where the average home consumes a mere 580 kilowatt hours per month, compared with 1,200 in Virginia, 1,100 in Maryland and 800 in the District. Fortunately, help is on the way. For LCDs, there are new methods of illumination. That's important because liquid crystals are really smart engineering, but they're not very bright. That is, they don't emit light. They only control its passage by way of a special talent: If you hit the crystals with an electric charge, they twist around and change their orientation, sort of like the slats in a Venetian blind.
In an LCD screen, the crystals are sandwiched between two glass plates along with a set of transparent electrodes -- materials that conduct electricity. Behind the whole sandwich is a light source. According to a pattern of signals sent by the set's electronics, the crystals at each pixel (short for picture element -- the individual dots on your screen) either block the outgoing light or allow it to pass to the front of the screen. That ever-shifting pattern of pixels makes the picture.
Of course, something has to provide the light, and fluorescent tubes have traditionally done the job quite nicely. But light-emitting diodes (the ubiquitous "LEDs" found in cameras, digital clocks and other electronic gear, updated traffic lights and so forth) are a lower-power alternative. Hence the recent advent of "LED TV," a phrase that really means an LCD system backlit by LEDs, which are approximately 40 percent more efficient than conventional fluorescent systems.
LEDs are simple and literally really cool: Each diode contains two kinds of semiconductor material. One type has a surplus of electrons; the other has regions where electrons are absent, known as holes. If you run voltage across the LED, electrons from one type combine with holes from the other and emit light as they do so. The process produces very little heat. And the LEDs, which are basically just big transistors, last a long time.
It may be harder to reduce power demand in plasma sets. These units get their stunning display from a completely different process: At each pixel, a current zaps a tiny quantity of trapped neon or xenon gas, giving it so much energy that it blows the electrons right off the atoms. As the electrons return to their original locations, they emit the extra energy as high-frequency (chiefly ultraviolet) radiation. The UV in turn strikes minerals that glow red, green or blue depending on their chemical composition. Each pixel is its own light source. So when one is off, it's really black -- thus providing dramatic contrast ratios.
Some plasma TV manufacturers are already making progress in cutting energy consumption, and the task can't really pose an insuperable challenge to the nation that brought you high-fiber Pop-Tarts and Chia Pets in the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Just watch that space.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003056.html
