EMBEDDED CHIPS
The Off button may be more of a drain than you think. The average set-top cable box, for example, consumes almost as much electricity when it's turned off as when it's on. Computer peripherals, VCRs, microwaves, televisions, answering machines, and rechargers are all what power experts call "energy vampires," quietly sucking electricity when they're in standby mode. In a recent study of San Francisco Bay Area households, researchers at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that, on average, 10 percent of all electricity went to supply standby power, costing consumers about $80 a year. Nationwide, the annual price tag is roughly $3.5 billion.
San Jose-based Power Integrations (www.powerint.com) offers a technical fix: a tiny chip that can be embedded in appliances and electronic devices to reduce the standby power drain by 75 to 90 percent. The company has sold more than 500 million power-conversion chips - called the TOPSwitch and the TinySwitch - to manufacturers like General Electric, Sony, and Panasonic.
Most companies, however, are still ignoring the issue. "Many products are very poorly designed because they're in such a hurry to get them out to market," says Alan Meier, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley. "They use cheap power-supply components with high standby losses, and they don't bother to enable power management inside their devices."
The problem is likely to get worse as consumers choose to network their homes. "A lot of people think that by networking all your appliances, you're saving energy," says Meier. "You'll save some energy while they're operating, but then you'll consume a lot while they're in standby."
Power Integrations CEO Howard Earhart believes that when the nation's power grid is stretched to the limit, as California's was last year, government and business will look for ways to reduce energy consumption. "The US has been a land of plenty when it comes to electric power, and our prices haven't been as high as elsewhere'," says Earhart. "But the technology is there to reduce waste."
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