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Apr 11, 2006

"The seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside." --Rainer Maria Rilke

Stand-by Energy Drain

Talk about non-intuitive: a typical microwave oven uses more electricity for its digital clock than it does in heating food! Why? Well, while heating food requires more than 100 times what it takes to power a clock, most microwave ovens stand idle -- in “standby” mode -- more than 99% of the time. Lawrence Berkeley Lab's Alan Meier did research in Florida, California, and Japan, and found that standby power accounted for as much as 10% of household power-consumption, corresponding to about 5 GigaWatts of total electricity demand in the US. How much is that? Enough to serve 600 million square feet of commercial office space; it's a good thing that Meier has also come up with three strategies.