Trilateral management of a two-headed power dragon

Trilateral management of a two-headed power dragon

Representatives from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. met recently in Mexico City to talk about standby power and what can be done to improve designs and reduce power waste. I was able to catch up with Richard Fassler aka Mr. Green from Power Integrations (www.powerint.com/greenroom/index.html) who was attending the conference. Topics discussed at the conference included standby power, and energy efficiency standards. The attendees at the meeting sought to make the standby initiative a horizontal 1-W requirement for all devices so that no device when off, can draw more than 1 W. In a sense, they were trying to reign-in the two-headed dragon of power designers and power users so that future products will be run efficiently and used intelligently.

Most electronic products continue to consume power unless they are unplugged from the wall. For example, TVs, DVD players, CD players, and audio amplifiers consume power all the time. Even a cell-phone charger left plugged into the wall consumes power, even when not charging the phone. You can find a list of household products and the standby power they consume and this link: http://standby.lbl.gov/Data/SummaryChart.html. For your next design you can find a list of recommended standby levels, tips for identifying devices with standby power, a summary of test procedures for measuring standby power use, and a list of products with low standby power provided by the Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) http://oahu.lbl.gov. You can even submit standby power data for your products.

Paul O’Shea