We Have Met the Enemy, and Once Again ...

August 16, 2007 – Ah, Paris in summer–the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, hearty Burgundies ... and set-top boxes. Set-top boxes? Qu'est-ce que c'est? you may ask (if you're French or just goofing around). Well, set-top boxes were at the top of my agenda a few weeks ago, when I attended the Set-Top Box Workshop hosted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in the City of Lights.

What’s the big deal about set-top boxes? Well, according to a recent study conducted by the NRDC, set-top boxes (STBs) are becoming one of the biggest energy users in our homes, “consuming over 23 billion kWh of electricity nationwide, resulting in power plant emissions of over 15 million tons of CO₂” per year. Worse, a hefty portion of that energy is wasted while the box is supposed to be turned off.

So, who's the culprit? In the early energy-efficiency meetings, the STB manufacturers were tagged as the bad guys. They used inefficient power supplies in early boxes, including (gasp!) linear transformer-based supplies. But, as I learned at the Paris workshop, that’s history. A typical STB internal power supply is now over 80% efficient.

With the STB manufacturers absolved, attention turned to the service providers, who dictate what functions must stay powered up during standby modes. This was a real eye-opener; most STBs continue to use almost 90% of their active-on power while they’re in standby (even though the user has turned them off and not they’re not performing their primary function). Two major reasons for this high energy consumption are anticipatory downloading to the STB’s hard drive of movies or programs that you might want to order and updates to software such as the electronic program guide.

So it's the service providers. Case solved!

But wait, the service providers say their customers won’t accept the consequence of actually turning off an STB, because when it turns on, customers then have to wait minutes for it to boot up while it receives updates. In other words, when a user turns the TV on at kick-off time, they expect that program to start now, not five minutes from now.

In short, once again “we have met the enemy and he is us.”* The bad guys are us, the STB users. Do we really need to have our STBs work instantly when we turn them on? Could we live with a short boot-up period, as we do with our computers and peripherals? If we could adjust our expectations, the result would be pretty impressive. The NRDC thinks we could save over 10 billion kWh per year, or the equivalent of three 600 MW power plants.

Of course, this would mean delaying gratification, if only for a few minutes. As with so many questions of energy use, we have to look at ourselves and decide whether we are willing to change our habits.

And then there are the really big questions: Will enough of us understand the need to change our habits in order to save energy, and will we accept the necessity for doing so? Can education and encouragement create this kind of change? Or will we just continue to do as we have done and needlessly burn megawatts every year?

What do you think? I'd love to hear from you. Just click on the "comment" button below.

To learn more about the problem, download a summary of the NRDC STB study.

• Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo cartoon strip first used this quote on a poster for Earth Day in 1970.