That’s the the title of a recent editorial in Geare magazine (#56, July/August 2009) from Jez Ford, one of my editors. If you met Jez, you’d learn instantly that he is most certainly not a doom and gloom kind of guy. If fact, in this editorial he’s injected a very sensible note into the hysterical anti-power-consumption crusade of much of the media.
In particular, he notes the ‘widely-quoted statistic that standby power alone consumes 10-12% of total home power in Australia.’ And points out that according to the International Energy Agency, about 15% of household power consumption is due to electronic devices. Put those figures together and ‘it would mean that our electronic devices use up to four times as much power when they’re off as when they’re on.’