I am a pretty keen environmentalist whatever one of those is; I am truly unsure as it is one of those all encompassing definitions to describe a broad range of people who can differ quite significantly. But if one of the qualifying factors of being an environmentalist is that one should care deeply about the future of our planet and actively do something, nomatter how small to positiviely make a difference, then I do fall into that category.
However, and being a rather cynical person on the whole, I like to check things out for myself, especially when it comes to claims by different organisations and their use of statistics. The one message that is peddled out continually by whichever rent-a-mouth can be found is that if we all turned our TV’s off instead of leaving them on standby then we’d save enough electricity to close down a nuclear power station. This is a rather grand statement, a bit simplistic and headline grabbing so I thought I’d check it out.
There is however a flaw in this statement, it being, as in many other cases in life, not all things are equal, especially not nuclear power stations. Britains oldest working nuclear power station is Dungeness which has a power output rating of 225MegaWattHours. (For those who don’t know, all measures of energy are in hours, so KiloWattHours, MegaWattHours etc). Compare this to Britain’s newest nuclear plant, Sizewell B which has an output of 1188MegaWattHours. That is five times the capacity of Dungeness so which nuclear power station could we shut down if we turned off our TV’s instead of leaving them on standby?
Again, there’s a lot of variables to consider and to be frank, enough to make such a claim completely pointless but for arguments sake and in the Spirit of Jon Snow, for just a bit of fun we will persist. There are a lot of household items that can be left on standby, however the largest culprits are the TV, Satellite/Cable box and DVD/VCR players. Of all these devices there are vast differences in terms of energy used depending on the make and model of the device. I decided to tot up the standby power usages of our electronic devices. So, TV’s, three of those, an old Decca Colour that’s older than me and pre-remote control so that’s out, a portable Phillips with a standy power rating of >3watts and another more modern Phillips TV with a standby power rating of >1watt. So that’s >4watts for all the TV’s. Then there’s the satellite and cable box, both with >1watt standby power ratings. The DVD player is a cheapo