Standby Trends in Australia and Mandatory Standby Power Proposals

Charles Edlington, Australian Greenhouse Office
Paul Ryan and Melissa Damnics, EnergyConsult Pty Ltd
Lloyd Harrington, Energy Efficient Strategies Pty Ltd

Keywords

Abstract

In 2002, Australia was one of the first countries to officially adopt a maximum standby power goal of 1 Watt for all appliances and equipment types. Australia has since released 30 standby “profiles” for different products, setting short and long term targets that need to be met, to avoid product regulation. In assessing industry progress toward these targets two monitoring tasks have been undertaken. The first is an intrusive survey involving the measurement of standby states and power levels for all plug-loads present in homes. The second is an ongoing measurement of standby modes for new appliances on sale in retail outlets, which has provided a time series database of standby consumption of over 5,000 products. One of the key outcomes of this is a generic horizontal approach to deal with the amorphous nature of equipment under constant development, like home entertainment equipment.

These home entertainment products were initially identified with voluntary targets, however, due to industry group requests, consideration is being given to a proposed mandatory regulation that may provide potential energy savings of 1.7 GWh pa and greenhouse emission reductions of 1.7 Mt CO2-e pa by 2020. Maximum passive standby power levels of between 4 and 6 watts are proposed by 2008 with 1 watt being required for all home entertainment products by 2012. Evidence suggests that these products remain in active standby for extended periods of time so the regulation includes the requirement that devices automatically switch to passive standby after 30 minutes of inactivity. This requirement represents approximately 75% of the projected impacts and the benefit of this will increase as the proliferation of such devices rises.