Time for "Standby" to Stand Aside

One of my pet peeves in modern life is the sheer number of devices that glare at me at night, even when they are off. My Playstation 2 has a bright red light, my VCR and DVD players glare a bright clock at me, even my sound system has a bright red LED glaring at me. And those are just the devices in my bedroom! All of these LEDs are part of the standby power system on these devices, which allow devices to start up quickly from "off". It turns out that these systems are not without a cost and without waste.

All that power adds up. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that standby power accounts for 1.5 percent of OECD member countries' residential electricity use. This is only an average, though; highly industrialized and wealthy countries like Germany have a much higher number, about 4 percent. That's 20 terawatt hours (TWh) of "wasted" electricity each year in just one country.
Over the course of a device's lifetime, the cost of all that standby power can actually exceed the cost of having the device on. The IEA estimates that each watt shaved from a unit's standby power measurement will save buyers $3 to $8 over the course of that product's life.

The IAE is trying to put forth the "1 Watt Initiative" to ask all electronics manufacturers to commit to standby modes that use 1 Watt or less. That is real money, and a real savings in power used by our country.