Standby power has been a cornerstone of energy efficiency policy since the 1990s, but initiatives like “1 Watt” have been pushing the boundaries of standby power regulation. At the same time, new technologies in electronic products — like the widespread use of both wired and wireless networks — have complicated the standby power question. In late 2012, the International Energy Agency’s 4E Standby Power Annex funded Ecova to investigate new cross-cutting areas for addressing standby power. Peter May-Ostendorp of Xergy Consulting led the research team as principal investigator.
Our team probed the underlying functions delivered by products when they are operating in their lowest power modes: the LED indicators that signal a device’s power state; the soft keypads and touchscreen displays that now adorn even traditional white goods products like refrigerators and laundry equipment; the now-ubiquitous network adapters that find their way into products ranging from computers to televisions to (if you can believe it) washers and dryers. Our final report is a roadmap for global policymakers to help identify the most impactful areas for further research.
One of the major opportunities that we identified was to comprehensively address the power use (particularly in standby) of networking services. This includes traditional high-speed, wired networking like Ethernet as well as various forms of wireless networking, from WiFi to Zigbee. Key to this effort is to ensure that manufacturers of consumer goods use the lowest bandwidth form of networking required to accomplish the needed communication. We saw examples of so-called “smart” washers and dryers using high-speed WiFi interfaces to deliver simple control and power state information when low-power alternatives like Zigbee exist. The network opportunity has long been on the radar of the energy efficiency community, but new estimates suggest that the situation is more urgent than previously thought. Australian researchers recently estimated that network energy use may already surpass the energy use of data centers. Providing cloud services may be an energy-intensive endeavor, but actually delivering those services to end users may be just as costly from an energy standpoint.