CEA Energy-Use Survey Awaits IEC Action on DTV Test Procedures

“Products change very quickly,” said Roth, who gave advance survey results at an Oct. CEA Industry Forum in San Francisco. “Product lifetimes in many cases are short,” he said, noting that policy-making on CE energy use often employs outdated or unreliable data, a flaw the CEA study will fix.

Preliminary results show CE products account for about 12% of U.S. residential energy consumption and about 4% of total energy demand, Roth said. The levels are higher than previous studies found; CE energy use doubtless is up because more households have more products, he said. But apples-to-apples comparisons with past CE energy consumption have been difficult because it has been “a real challenge to get good data,” Roth said.

Bigger and bigger CRT TVs “over time” bred higher overall CE energy use by products in “active” mode, he said. Industry participation in EPA’s Energy Star program has made CE more energy-efficient in standby, he said, noting that in the late 1990s the average VCR in standby drew 5.5 w, while today’s average DVD player consumes only 1.5 w in standby.

DTV test procedures are being developed and what scant DTV data is available is based on sets sold in 2004, he said, noting that the “bulk” of the DTV market includes sets sold since. Screen size figures in gauging DTV energy efficiency, as with analog, he said. But he hedged when asked repeatedly at the CEA conference if data eventually will show DTVs are less energy-efficient than analog. “I'm not sure,” he told one questioner: “Digital might consume more” than analog, “but we'd really have to see the data.”

Doug Johnson, CEA senior dir.-technology policy & international affairs, said the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is at work on standardized methods for measuring DTV energy consumption. But there has been “much disagreement” in that body due to geographic variations in how TV sets are used. As a result, “we're not comfortable” quoting energy-efficiency data that would allow, for example, “head-to-head comparisons between LCD and plasma -- which is probably on everyone’s mind,” Johnson said: “We hope to get there by next spring.” An area of IEC disagreement is the screen brightness levels to use in energy efficiency testing, Roth said. IEC is working to find “a good level that’s representative for that test procedure,” Roth said: “But it’s a global test procedure, and there’s a lot of different parties involved in the process.”

Brian Markwalter, CEA vp-technology & standards, said the goal is to have IEC draft specifications available by CES. Reaching consensus on standardized “test materials” will take the longest, Markwalter said. CEA won’t necessarily wait for an approved IEC standard, he said. But once a “stable” body of test materials exists, “we're going to ask manufacturers to go measure.” Q1, the CEA study will begin “taking data,” he said.

If preliminary data showed increases in analog screen size figured centrally in higher CE energy consumption, won’t DTV data show electricity use climbing even higher, based on exponentially larger LCD and plasma screen sizes? we asked at the CEA conference. Roth wouldn’t answer that or another of our questions: Whether flat-panel means more or less energy efficiency vs. other TV technologies, analog or digital.

Mark Sharp, group mgr. in Panasonic’s Corporate Environmental Dept., chimed in to say: “No one here is suggesting there won’t be potentially increased energy use in the future.” Among public policy-makers, there’s already “a perception that we're using a lot more energy,” Sharp said: “So the whole purpose of the study is to try and address that and give policymakers realistic data. If it ends up showing that the evolution to larger screen sizes results in an uptick in energy consumption, that'll at least be an accurate figure representative of real world data. That’s really what we're after.”