Under a historic agreement announced recently,
the electricity used by the more than 230 million set-top boxes
installed in America’s homes by your cable, satellite, or telephone
company will be slashed by 10 to 45 percent, depending on the model, and
save consumers a whopping $1 billion annually.
The signatories include
NRDC and other energy efficiency advocacy groups, along with companies
in the pay-TV industry that include such household names as Comcast,
Time Warner Cable, DIRECTV, AT&T, and Motorola.
The agreement
caps a year of negotiations between the pay-TV industry and efficiency
advocates and is great news for consumers and the environment because it
will save three power plants’ worth of electricity – and 5 million
metric tons of carbon pollution that contributes to climate change --
every year by 2017.
And beginning January 1, America’s 90 million
pay-TV subscribers for the first time will be able to easily find out
how much electricity their set-top box uses and be ensured a wide range
of more efficient models to choose from in the future.
How Did We Get Here?
NRDC and its consultant Ecova published an indepth study in
2011 of the energy consumption of set-top boxes and found these devices
consumed at least $3 billion worth of electricity annually, much of it
when the box is turned “off” and the user is neither watching nor
recording a show. Consumers have little choice regarding the set-top box
placed in their home because the service provider owns the box and
decides which one to install. As a result, the pay-TV providers until
recently paid little attention to how much energy the boxes wasted
because they weren’t paying the electric bills. But NRDC’s extensive
advocacy attracted wide media attention, including on the front page of
the New York Times, which generated interest by policymakers including
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, and the Department of Energy. Since then
the industry has been hard at work and has made substantial improvements
to their devices.
Given their renewed focus on energy
efficiency, industry reached out to NRDC and other efficiency advocates
last year to discuss a potential agreement where the service providers
would make several commitments, most notably to procure more energy
efficient boxes in the future. After a yearlong negotiation, we got to
“yes” and the service providers, box manufacturers, and advocates signed
today’s agreement. This is a great development and the details are
provided below.
What commitments is industry making?
Future Purchases
– At least 90% of the boxes purchased annually by the service providers
will meet maximum allowable energy use limits. The levels vary based on
the set-top box’s features. For example, Digital Video Recorders (DVRs)
have higher allowances than a basic box. Beginning in 2014, 90 percent
of the boxes the service providers purchase will meet the energy use
levels in the Environmental Protection Agency’ s ENERGY STAR® Version
3.0 specification. By 2017, 90 percent of the purchases must meet a more
stringent set of negotiated energy levels called Tier 2, which
represent savings of 10 to 45%, depending on the type of model, compared
to a 2012 baseline.
Getting Cable Boxes to Sleep
– The cable industry committed to installing a light sleep function in
their DVRs, which will save around 5 to 7 watts of power by spinning
down the hard drive and related features when the user is not watching
or recording a show. Longer term, the cable industry will develop
prototype boxes that will offer “deep sleep” and consume much lower
levels of power when not in use. The prototypes will be field tested in
2014 and deployed in the future if the testing is successful.
Satellite to Provide Energy Efficient Whole Home Solutions –
The satellite companies, Dish Network and DIRECTV committed to make
available energy efficient whole home DVRs that are connected to the
main TV and can provide both live and recorded programming to all the
household’s televisions. As a result, second and third TVs will only
require a much lower energy-consuming “thin client” box, instead of a
DVR or standard receiver box. We are optimistic that cable will offer
similar systems in the future.
Energy Use Disclosures
– It’s very difficult for today’s consumers to find out how much energy
their set-top box uses or for prospective customers to make an informed
decision when shopping for service. Beginning in 2014, the service
providers will post on their websites readily accessible information on
the energy use of each of the new set-top boxes they offer customers.
This means that for the first time, consumers will be able to identify
the more efficient models, and just as importantly those that consume
much higher amounts of energy. We hope increased availability of this
information will lead to healthy competition between service providers,
who will then demand more efficient designs from suppliers.
In
addition, the agreement’s Steering Committee, which NRDC is a voting
member of, will publish an annual report that lists all new models and
their energy use, as well as an updated annual estimate of national
set-top box energy consumption. That way everyone can track how well the
voluntary agreement is working and how national set-top box energy use
is changing each year.
Field Verification
– Every year an independent firm will test set-top boxes in 100 homes
to ensure they are performing as promised regarding energy use. The
results will be included in the public annual report.
Why a voluntary agreement for set-top boxes and how will it work?
Set-top
boxes represent an unusual market. Their energy use depends upon three
factors: a) the design of the box, b) how the service provider deploys
it (for example, do they disable selected energy-savings features prior
to installation?), and c) the software at the service provider’s
end. Given that these devices are essentially part of a system, and the
fact that a small group of companies control the purchase of all the
boxes sold nationwide, efficiency advocates such as NRDC, the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
(ACEEE) believed faster progress could be made through a meaningful
voluntary agreement with the industry than through minimum efficiency
regulations set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) or state agencies
like the California Energy Commission (CEC).
The efficiency
advocates have voting seats on the agreement’s Steering Committee and
can closely monitor the progress being made. If industry fails to meet
its commitments, we will ask the federal and state agencies to restart
their proceedings to develop efficiency requirements for these products.
Here I’d like to also note that DOE and CEC have a
30-plus-years track record of setting mandatory energy efficiency
standards that have saved consumers hundreds of billions of dollars, and
mandatory standards continue to be the most effective way to lock in
energy savings for almost all other product categories.
Today’s
voluntary agreement is an important first step to reducing national
set-top box energy use. We hope it will not only translate to near-term
savings, but the next-generation boxes and their associated new
features will be designed to be efficient from the start -- and not
erode much of the hard-earned energy savings that this agreement is
designed to deliver.
http://theenergycollective.com/nrdcswitchboard/321096/historic-agreement-slash-energy-use-set-top-boxes-will-save-1-billion-annuall
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