War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up? The War On Standby rumbles on: this week, courtesy of the UK government and "third sector" quangocracy, we heard yet again that gadgets left on standby suck vast, planet-wrecking, expensive amounts of energy from our electricity sockets. It's an idea which has gained a lot of traction over the years. Many Reg readers (and …
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@Aldous
Thank you! I was wondering if I'd get through all 120-odd comments before someone pointed at that elephant in the room.
As a very rough guesstimate, I'd say that if the arty floodlighting was switched off at every town hall/civic centre/public building, each town could save a lot more leccy than if every stand-by device in the town was always switch off at the wall.
"Is this simply not a diversion tactic to fool consumers...?"
No. You could try adding some facts to your argument before posting. Like the commissioning of Staythorpe C, Grain, Langage, Severn, and Marchwood CCGT in the past couple of years, collectively rated at 6.8 GW of new capacity? Currently under construction includes West Burton (1.3 GW), Pembroke (2 GW) and there's a number of other plants building, consented or in the planning stage, several of which have been delayed simply because there isn't the electricity demand for them, including big CCGT proposals at Thorpe Marsh, WIlington C, Drakelow, Carrington. There's more, but I think that illustrates my point.
We've spent billions on these new assets, plus more on upgrading, extendings and cleaning up older assets, and billions more on government-mandated boondoggles like windpower. Ongoing closures partly of purely life expired assets, but also under the aegis of the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive are taking out the older and less efficient plant without greatly impacting the resilience of the grid, which remains as dependable/vulnerable as it always has been. It tends to be grid resilience not the balance of supply and demand that is the limiting factor, as an examination of famous power failures will evidence.
Should demand miraculously spring back to pre-recession heights I'd accept that we'd have limited reserve capacities at first, but DECC and NII are in the process of extending the operating lives of the UK nuclear fleet, and there's quite a few plants currently mothballed all over the country that could come back on line in days, plus you could have accelerated build out of consented schemes.
As for "banning tumble dryers"... well, how about government and industry supply the power I want when I want it, instead of trying to play god? My tumble dryer is an efficient condensor model, all the heat stays in the thermal envelope of the house, and I don't need some twit to tell me it costs money to run.
"Whenever an eco-activist starts going on about gadgets or electricity or food, ignore them. The big stuff is travel, making and having things (ie buildings, furniture, tools, interior decor, infrastructure etc) and heating/cooling (a large amount of this is laundry and personal hygiene)."
my partner and i have decided not to have children, thereby limiting the amount of co2/waste/what ever that v2.0 would of used. yet i get called "selfish" and accused of being a planet killer because i refuse to buy green things (because a new green tv is so much more efficient then sticking with an old one that works fine, no sunk in carbon in manufacture nope) and plan on buying a car that does 15-20 mpg(a 1990's era car at that, so again no sunk carbon in making new). Not to mention horror of horrors closing the curtains in my office room and using a light bulb (not much light from outside+ fully visible to street)
the point? the people calling me this often had 2+ children (more usually 3) that they each then kit out with the latest consumer crap/fashion(which changes every 6 months) and cart around in such wonderfully environmental cars as prius and MPV. We are probably more green then most "greenie" couples (no kids) due to not buying the latest whizz bang and buying things we like not what is new (i have some 15 year old clothes i wear with brand new for example)
With the world already overcrowded is it not the "think of the children" brigade with there spawn making the situation worse? after all if they have more then 2 children they are increasing the strain on the precious globe. nah its gadgets, Jeremy Clarkson and not enough windmills
Fun things to do at a middle class dinner party:
1) bring up the above,
2) mention how organic food (which your host/ess will almost certainly go on about as if it was made from gold) can feed 4 billion people, wait until they go "so what" before telling them the population of earth is around 7 billionish
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A while ago (must be several years ago) there was an article in New Scientist about being green. The author/interviewer was asking the expert about the various things people do to be green. At the end of the article, the author asked: "What is the one thing people can do which would have the biggest impact..." The experts reply: "Don't have children"
I'm doing my bit to be green !
"2) mention how organic food (which your host/ess will almost certainly go on about as if it was made from gold) can feed 4 billion people, wait until they go "so what" before telling them the population of earth is around 7 billionish"
And if they blink at you and go, "Yeah, so? Too many people on the planet, then. We need fewer of them."
Surely the whole point of these studies is to highlight waste. We all don't want our lifestyles to change, so the idea is to make the small changes to allow things to largely carry on in the way that we currently enjoy.
To do this we need to introduce efficiencies and reductions where we can, with out having to regress to a lifestyle reminiscent of the 1950's.
All I see in Lewis Pages articles are stories highlighting some research or recommendation that he rubbishes as not being worth the effort and frankly all it does is make him look short sighted.
What is at issue in this particular article is aggregate wastage.
Wastage. What is your TV/Satellite Box/Media Centre/PS3/xbox/laptop actually doing in standby. Absolutely nothing.
How much electricity is it using to do absolutely nothing. A little bit (a tiny bit even).
What benefit do you get. slightly speedier start up? Not having to walk across the room and power it on manually?
And at what cost.
Well - lets assume that each person in the UK wastes just 2kWh a year (I would probably suggest its more than this but lets go low so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to overstate my point).
Across every person in the UK.
Thats 120GWh. Which isn't a huge amount of energy. But lets have a quick glance at Lewis's other articles. Lets see:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/14/uk_milk_wastage_equals_tiny_number_of_cars/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/02/water_vs_energy_analysis/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/21/meat_diet_hardly_affects_climate_change/
The main thrust of which is all "Its not worth the effort to make any changes because the benefit is so tiny'
Well - I put it to you. These changes, not wasting milk, not wasting water and reducing the amount of meat we eat* are all tiny but they aggregate over a nation of 60 million (or a world populace of ~7billion) to become significant savings.
Lewis Page is taking numbers, taking tiny bites and arguing each tiny point down and refusing to accept that there is a larger potential for efficiency and saving that needs to be considered. He is doing this to support his own short sighted ideology of profits before sustainability.
Why he chooses this destructive selfish approach I can't say, I just wish he wouldn't.
The point is that 120GWh is around 0.013% of the total UK energy consumption. If the goal is to reduce CO2 output by 20% (say), we'll need 1,500 such initiatives to achieve our goal. I don't think Lewis is saying we should leave everything switched on unnecessarily, just that if a significant reduction in CO2 is your goal, it's not going to be achieved by lots of trivial measures.
Or, as Prof MacKay puts it: "if we all do a little, then we'll achieve a little".
You do realize our Mr. Page is in favor of nuclear, right? Disregarding ignorant notions about nuclear being made out of Satan, it doesn't get more sustainable for that. Nuclear for baseload, plenty of spare power to crack water for hydrogen fuel to use in cars, and we can keep our current lifestyle going approximately forever -- whether that's a good thing being, of course, a different question altogether, but not one which has any bearing on whether nuclear makes more sense than wind and hamsters.
Hi all, We had the lowest lamp consumption for many years using 2D stuff, now, slowly, we are going to LED, 12 volt from battery eventually, now the joke, it is not economically feasible to put switches in!!for 1 lamp it will take between 20 and 30 years to return the cost of electricity saved by turning off.
Computers, when on but not actually working ie the CPU is just sitting and the LED screen goes back the consumption is about 20W.
Oh yes what was I, had my own electrical business, taught, was EE for amongst others USAF.
silly gits who say turn off are VERY stupid as the surges cause serious problems, our machines are on UPS, we have mainly O/P central heating and our bills are some of the lowest around. A bread machine on its own cost more than a nightsorage radiator, it went in the bin.
So if someone says "Oh yes I unplug every nite" get them to show you their LED lamps, they cost about £15 each, have a life of about 100 years and running cost for 60w equivalent of between 1 and 3 w. Our old 2D's are/were about 16w.
I went through all the devices in my house I leave on and the only one that consumed a slightly significant amount of power was the DECT cordless phone base. It has a power supply that contains a transformer so that must be consuming a bit. I seem to remember it being as much as 20W for the whole thing which is a lot for a device I use at most once a week to speak to my mother.
I believe the sole purpose of at least 230% of the countries landline phones are used to speak to the owner's mother.
We had this discussion in the house the other night in fact - it used to be "a telephone line with broadband access". Now it should really be described as "a broadband line with free telephone access"
For a good while now, every phone call I receive on the landline gets the immediate response "I'll call you back on my mobile"
This is a very interesting article - good work Reg!
I think the devil really is in the detail when looking at corporate and domestic power consumption. There really is a strong tendency for QUANGOs and so on to over simplify the data in order to produce reports and send a clear message to consumers. The trouble is, doing this is unscientific and produces very inaccurate figures, which are then rubbished and this gives the climate sceptics more excuses not to change.
This article really does help put different types of power use in perspective.
Only if you use resistance elements.
Heat pumps supply about 4kW of heating for every 1kW of electricity used - effectively making the electricity 1/4 the price and significantly undercutting gas or heating oil as heat sources.
(heatpumps can be used to provide hot water and hot water central heating, not just to blow hot/cold air)
Of course I'd probably use heating oil/red diesel if I was in the countryside, simply because power supplies get unreliable in winter.
Heat pumps only work at the 4:1 ratio if they are fully specced out with the best quality materials and even then only on a good day. Look at some real figures and most systems which are installed in real situations will struggle to reach 3:1. Ground source are better than air source, but you either need a huge garden or a veeeeeeery deep pipe.
"Best get one for youself then"
What's the lifespan of a Solar PV array these days? Is it longer than the payback time?
(bearing in mind the associated "gubbins" that might not have such a long lifespan as the array itself)
ISTR that those crappy little wind generators B&Q used to sell for about a grand had a lifespan of approximately half the expected payback time.
In this brave new world of the 21st century with all of its history of innovation we occupants of this septic isle can only afford to turn on the heating in the dead of night and must worry about what our electric razor charger is going to do to our leccy bill.
Are we missing the bigger picture here?
...and something can be done about it. so it's very good that this report is highlighting it. Some of the responsibility falls on the person operating the equipment but most of it falls on the equipment manufacturers. I don't see what's outrageous about an organisation such as the energy saving trust promoting action on this matter.
And after consistent pressure at a European level via the Energy Using Product Directive the manufacturers of many product sectors have made great strides in reducing standby. Lewis notes that modern TVs have very low standby consumption which is absolutely correct but he needs to remember that not everyone has modern TVs. In fact the old ones are no doubt happily sitting in bedrooms or kitchens in standby ticking away.
47W or more of standby is very achievable. I just tested the kit in the corner of my living room (TV, Virgin box, cable modem and wifi router) and it came to 20W. And that's just three things, all of which can be switched off when not in use and by switching them off I'm getting a very welcome saving of about £15 per year on my electricity bill. I can easily see that a small family with multiple TVs, computers and assorted other devices could have standby consumption well in excess of 47W.
I find it strange that Lewis disses actual monitored data that takes our understanding of household electricity consumption much further on but holds up McKay's work as being correct when McKay was working with the much more limited data that existed back then leading him to underestimate the impact of standby. OK it's a small sample size but then I imagine monitoring every electricity using device in a house can't be cheap.
Yet again Lewis confirms my general rule of thumb that if he gets in a tizzy about something he doesn't like then it usually has merit, while if he promotes something as The Solution it usually doesn't.
"...and something can be done about it. so it's very good that this report is highlighting it. Some of the responsibility falls on the person operating the equipment but most of it falls on the equipment manufacturers. I don't see what's outrageous about an organisation such as the energy saving trust promoting action on this matter."
Even if that's true, it's in no-one's interest to try and 'highlight' the issue with bad science. It does no-one any favours.
"47W or more of standby is very achievable. I just tested the kit in the corner of my living room (TV, Virgin box, cable modem and wifi router) and it came to 20W."
That's anecdata, i.e. not worth bothering with. It may well be 'achievable', but if you read the article, it demonstrates pretty conclusively that the way the EST reached that figure is completely invalid and not at all supported by the data.
"I find it strange that Lewis disses actual monitored data that takes our understanding of household electricity consumption much further"
Well, he didn't. He mostly accepted the measured data - with qualifications, citing cases where it seems very unlikely that it's really accurate. The main thrust of this article is pointing out that the report draws invalid conclusions from that data. It's the _report_ that disrespects the monitored data, not this article.
In what way has he demonstrated that it's bad science or that the standby conclusion is incorrect? Lewis has pointed out some inconsistencies but that's hardly surprising in a 600 page report that deals with many millions of data points and consequentially a need to resort to software to pick through this data. But to suggest that this invalidates the standby findings is plainly incorrect but typical of his agenda-driven reportage.
Naturally the figures I gave were anecdotal but of course we have the real data in our hands, so let's take a look at the main report and compare it with my 'anecdata'. Sky box consumption varies between 15W and 20W over a 24 hr period so let's call standby 15W. The average router was 6.3W, LCD TVs are a couple of watts on average, which already brings us to over 20W and half way to the 47W figure.
I find it bizarre that there is such denial of this real data. Standby is an issue, however much people want to wish it away. Some of it is being dealt with (TVs are a prime example) but it will take quite a while for the impacts to filter through. Other product types have most definitely not been dealt with and legislation should be brought to bear on manufacturers who are foisting shoddy products that cost us a lot of money each year.
The same goes for in use consumption which is of course much bigger than standby consumption. But to suggest, as Lewis does, that we should ignore standby because other issues are bigger (and he does this all the time) is plainly nonsense. It's an easy, highly cost effective win and we'll need these simple and small wins every bit as much as the big wins.
"In what way has he demonstrated that it's bad science or that the standby conclusion is incorrect?"
Bottom of page 1, top of page 2. ""Modems" in the study were "on standby" drawing 10 watts no less than 79 per cent of the time they were monitored. "Speakers" spent 32 per cent of their time on standby. Etc, etc." How can that data be used?
Hell, there's one right there in your figures: "The average router was 6.3W". When is the average router 'on standby'? I don't recall ever seeing a router with a 'standby' mode - a 'power' button which doesn't actually fully turn it off, but leaves it in a 'dormant' mode from which it can return to active quickly and possibly via remote control. Are you claiming there are such routers? If not, how exactly can you count the typical power consumption of a router as part of 'the standby problem'? You can say that people shouldn't leave routers turned on all the time (though good luck with that), but that's not the same thing at all as 'the standby problem'.
(You also rely on Sky boxes to get 15W of your figure; certainly not everyone has such a box).
80 watts doesn't seem a lot to me.
I have a 4 or 5 year old sony bravia 46inch TV which uses approx 180w when on and 70w in standby !
my router uses 15w and that has to be left on 24 hours a day whether you call that standby or not i leave up to you but is isn't in use all the the time that's a dead cert.
with PVR left in standby at 28w I'm well over 80w already!
My nice new 60inch Sharp tv uses less than a watt in standby and that is how it should be.
But without any pressure on the manufacturers over their standby usage it would never have changed.
"I have a 4 or 5 year old sony bravia 46inch TV which uses approx 180w when on and 70w in standby !"
...
"My nice new 60inch Sharp tv uses less than a watt in standby and that is how it should be."
If you're buying a brand new giant TV every four years, that's a much bigger problem than standby power draw. What the hell was so bad about your old TV?
MS-Windows check for update - doesn't it default to starting at 3:00am?
PVR downloads the Guide info starting at 3:00am.
Like most, our dishwasher has a 2,4,6 Hour delayed start. We aim for 3:00am +/- when we press it.
Downloading podcasts - 3:00am.
Water softener recharge cycle - programmed to run at 3:00am.
it's an article by lewis page which is actually sensible and fully supported. miracles will never cease! congratulations, makes its case clearly and convincingly and doesn't over-reach: a textbook case of terrible, terrible data analysis.
What it looks like to me, from the aerial and other examples, is that the software in the study was set simply to assume that any power draw under a certain threshold was 'standby' - say, under 5W. So it winds up thinking that low-draw devices - like signal boosters - are always either 'off' (when they're actually doing nothing) or 'standby' (when they're on), never 'on'. So their 'on' power draw gets categorized as 'standby', incorrectly inflating the standby figures.
Then, of course, the EST analyzed the raw data in ways which it doesn't at all support, as well described in the article.
see, lewis? It's not so hard, is it...
Where's the proof it matters, does a few Wh hours standby per device really matter when the base load of a house is say 150Wh; the energy and cost saving argument is a joke.
All this guilt-tripping, eco-saving, PC BS make (fake) work often causes more waste e.g. most recycling actually wastes more time, money and energy than just land filling the waste and using virgin materials.
A better idea is look at the total power consumption of a home, and only look for significant and economical savings e.g. all LED lights instead of filament lights may save up to 1KWh, LED rather than fluorescent backlit LCD TVs and Monitors could save several Wh each, and any other equipment which requires less total power for a task, like smaller ovens; but only if any extra cost can be recovered from the expected lifespan and energy cost savings, or other benefits; otherwise it is just a foolish waste of time and money.
Ceres Powers' CHP demo looks interesting; however it not available yet, in-part due to fuel cell corrosion issues and production engineering time, so we'll have to see what the final capabilities and total costs will be; however it definitely sounds more practical than mains feed Solar Panels.
For bulk power generation I'd like to know when will we see Thorium salt fission reactor electricity generation in the UK, given Uranium reactor designs look like they are hamstrung for political, military, and corporate reasons, so we end up with lot of poorly utilised hot radioactive waste; now that's waste which would be worth recycling and using properly, so it doesn't come back as fallout when any rod cooling ponds boil dry.
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