Submitted by Ken.Erdmann on Wed, 01/18/2012 - 11:36pm

 Last Thursday the California Energy Commission voted to regulate phone chargers, computer power supplies and other small battery chargers.  Most of us remember this body as the group that imposed new energy consumption limits on flat panel televisions a couple of years ago.  

The manufacturers are as usual not happy about more rules and regulations especially when just as they get the regulators in California happy they get to start over with the Department of Energy.  Talk about the potential for a bunch of different standards maybe on a state by state basis.  While these rules are meant to save energy and therefore money any additional design and manufacturing costs associated with these new standards will be passed on to the consumer.  

According to an Associated Press article by Noaki Schwartz there are 170 million chargers in use in California, that equates to an average of 11 chargers per household.  Add to those chargers all the cable set top boxes, satellite receivers, DVRs and other bits and peices that go to standby instead of off and you have a pretty impressive amount of wasted energy.  The boffins at Lawrence Berkeley Natiional Laboratory figure that there are on average of 40 devices in each home constantly drawing power.  In fact they figure that these devices amount to 13 percent of home energy use in California.  They also figure that the number of these devices will only continue to increase and left unaddressed the problem will only get worse.  

So the new chargers that are compliant will use less energy while doing the same job, cost more and might even help with the increasing hamonics problems we are starting to see.  Now hold on to your butts, the new standards are set to take effect on Feb. 1, 2013.  If this is really the case we should start seeing California compliant stuff later this year.  If the manufacturers are forced to build the stuff for California count on seeing it all over the country, if it is good enough for them count on it being good enough for the rest of us.  

Those same boffins at Lawrence Berkeley figure that if all the devices were compliant to the new regulations enough energy could be conserved to power 350,000 homes and could save consumers $306 million dollars.  

Our lives are about to change again.  I would say good luck, but I know you are an adaptable lot and will have no trouble making it work.

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