Stand-by craziness

So, Gordon Brown has announced the UK government’s draft climate change stuff. Full of ideas, certainly — properly insulating homes; good idea. Removing stand-by from consumer electronics; wtf? Seems like a good idea (possibly), but it isn’t.

Probably good for winning votes. Useful? Not particularly. It just seems like a way to introduce inconvenience into people’s lives for no reason. I suppose it could save the odd house-fire (which would be good); it would indeed cut power usage. And there’s the thing; they don’t need to take standby out of electronic goods to make them save electricity. There’s no reason standby needs to be a bad thing.

In fact, each year, companies release microcontrollers that run on less and less power. Those RFID swipe cards you use are a form of microcontroller, and they’re powered by the magnetic field of the reader! Sure, some electronic goods have ridiculously wasteful standby modes; but they needn’t. Your iPod goes into standby when you “turn it off” — Apple don’t even see the need to have actual power off on something that’s battery powered; I’m guessing that the microcontroller is fairly efficient.

The technology is already there; that should be the new law — make companies use current technology; introduce standards on how much power certain goods can use when they’re on standby (and while they’re on for that matter; some things are ridiculously wasteful). Make them ambitious if you like, I’m sure the engineers at electronics companies would like a challenge.

And while you’re at it, introduce requirements to use efficient power supplies (most aren’t); introduce requirements for automatic standby modes on certain equipment; try and reduce the losses in power line transmission (impossible, perhaps, but I don’t really know); and make power stations more efficient!

What’s the point of making a tiny dent in power usage (with the standby thing), when the same gains (and more) could be realised by making our power sources more efficient? This whole thing just seems like a way to seem more green without doing anything difficult. (Actually, telling companies to take stand-by out of things seems pretty difficult to me; but I guess government can just blame corporations when the whole thing fails. In the meantime, they’ve lost the opportunity to actually do something useful, though.)

The insulation thing is a good idea; the lightbulb thing is a good idea; this stand-by thing is just stupid.