Wonder what that "stand-by" light is costing you?

Turns out that going Hybrid with our cars may not be the best way to make a dent in our foreign oil dependency. Cutting down on the power consumed by electronic devices in stand-by mode could do a lot for us.

In 1998 they released an initial study which estimated that standby power accounted for approximately 5% of total residential electricity consumption in America, “adding up to more than $3 billion in annual energy costs”. According to America's Department of Energy, national residential electricity consumption in 2004 was 1.29 billion megawatt hours (MWh)—5% of which is 64m MWh. The wasted energy, in other words, is equivalent to the output of 18 typical power stations.

I am not generally a fan of regulation, but any National Energy Policy should contain a line item to get this problem under control. Why focus on lower-power microwaves, when we can simply cut down on the power suck from when NOTHING is going on?