Standby power use is the electricity consumed by appliances when they are switched off or not performing their primary purpose. Results from 21 separate field studies of residential standby power use and eight bottom-up national estimates of standby power use in 17 countries were compiled. Average standby power use in the field measurements ranges from about 30 W in China to over 100 W in New Zealand and the United States. The weighted average of the measurements was about 50 W. The bottom-up estimates found that standby power was responsible for 3-12 percent of residential electricity use. There is insufficient information to determine if standby power use is increasing or declining.

This report summarizes results of a literature review, a workshop, and many meetings with demand response and thermostat researchers and implementers. The information obtained from these resources was used to identify key issues of thermostat performance from both energy savings and peak demand perspectives. A research plan was developed to address these issues and activities have already begun to pursue the research agenda.

Many domestic appliances and commercial equipment consume some electric power when they are switched off or not performing their primary purpose. The typical loss per appliance is low (from 1 to 25 W) but, when mulitplied by the billions of appliances in houses and in commercial buildings, standby losses represent a significant fraction of total electricity use. Several initiatives to reduce standby losses have appeared in different parts of the world. One proposal, the 1-watt plan, seeks to harmonize these initiatives by establishing a single target for all appliances. This paper explains the background to the 1-watt plan, identifies some unresolved aspects, and gives some estimates of energy savings.

An increasing amount of electricity is used by equipment that is neither fully "on" nor fully "off." We call these equipment states low power modes, or "lopomos." "Standby" and "sleep" are the most familiar lopomos, but some new products already have many modes. Lopomos are becoming common in household appliances, safety equipment, and miscellaneous products. Ross and Meier (2000) reports that several international studies have found standby power to be as much as 10 percent of residential energy consumption. Lopomo energy consumption is likely to continue growing rapidly as products with lopomos that use significant amounts of energy penetrate the market. Other sectors such as commercial buildings and industry also have lopomo energy use, perhaps totaling more in aggregate than that of households, but no comprehensive measurements have been made. In this paper, we propose a research agenda for study of lopomo energy consumption. This agenda has been developed with input from over 200 interested parties. Overall, there is consensus that lopomo energy consumption is an important area for research. Many see this as a critical time for addressing lopomo issues. As equipment designs move from the binary "on/off" paradigm to one that encompasses multiple power modes, there is a unique opportunity to address the issue of low power mode energy consumption while technology development paths are still flexible.

The goal of this investigation was to estimate the 1999 energy consumption of set-top boxes and telephony products in the U.S. residential sector. Results of this study will be used to identify new energy conservation opportunities and to align programs with those opportunities. We conducted a bottom-up analysis for set-top boxes and telephony products using our own power measurements and stock and usage estimates from secondary sources. The most common set-top boxes in U.S. homes in 1999 were analog cable boxes, digital cable boxes, wireless receivers, and game consoles. According to these measurements, analog cable boxes and wireless receivers draw between 10 and 15 watts, while digital cable boxes draw between 20 and 25 watts in both the Active and Standby modes. Video games used less than 2 watts in Standby mode, and about 8 watts when Active. We estimate that set-top boxes accounted for 0.7 percent of residential electricity use in 1999. Our investigation of telephony products included answering machines, cordless phones, cordless phone answering machine combination units, and mobile phone chargers. Answering machines, cordless phones, and combination units use between 2 and 3 watts in both the Active and Standby modes. Mobile phone chargers use about 1 watt in standby. We estimate that these telephony products account for 0.5 percent of U.S. residential electricity consumption. Together, set-tops and telephony constituted 1.2 percent of U.S. residential electricity consumption in 1999. Standby power use accounted for about 60 percent of this energy use. The combined total energy use of the products investigated for this study and those researched previously for this series of reports account for about 6.6 percent of residential electricity use in the U.S.

In spite of the recent explosive growth in the use of office and network equipment, there has been no recent study that estimates in detail how much electricity is consumed by that equipment in the United States. In this study, we examined energy use by office equipment and network equipment at the end of 1999. We classified office equipment into 11 types; for each type we estimated annual energy consumption for residential, commercial, and industrial use by combining estimates of stock, power requirements, usage, and saturation of power management. We also classified network equipment into six types and estimated the annual energy consumption for each type. We found that total direct power use by office and network equipment is about 74 TWh per year, which is about 2 percent of total electricity use in the U.S. When electricity used by telecommunications equipment and electronics manufacturing is included, that figure rises to 3 percent of all electricity use (Koomey 2000). More than 70 percent of the 74 TWh/year is dedicated to office equipment for commercial use. We also found that power management currently saves 23 TWh/year, and complete saturation and proper functioning of power management would achieve additional savings of 17 TWh/year. Furthermore, complete saturation of night shutdown for equipment not required to operate at night would reduce power use by an additional 7 TWh/year. Finally, we compared our current estimater with our 1995 forecast for 1999. We found that the total difference between our current estimte and the previous forecast is less than 15 percent and identified the factors that led to inaccuracies in the previous forecast. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis of the uncertainties in our current forecast and identified the data sets that have the largest impact on our current estimate of energy use.