Standby power

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Standby power, also called Vampire power refers to the electric power consumed by electronic appliances in a standby mode. A very common "electricity vampire" is a power adaptor built on a plug with no power switch. However, while this consumption of power is used to provide functions for appliances such as remote controls and digital clocks to the user, most of the power consumed is considered wasted.

Alan Meier, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley noted that many household appliances are never fully switched off, but spend most of the time in a standby mode. His 1998 study estimated that standby power consumption accounted for approximately 5% of total residential electricity consumption in America, “adding up to more than $3 billion in annual energy costs”. According to America's Department of Energy, national residential electricity consumption in 2004 was 1.29 billion megawatt hours (MWh)—5% of which is 64m MWh. The wasted energy, in other words, is equivalent to the output of 18 typical power stations.

His 2000 study showed that standby power accounted for around 10% of household power-consumption. That same year, a similar study in France found that standby power accounted for 7% of total residential consumption. Further studies have since come to similar conclusions in other developed countries, including the Netherlands, Australia and Japan. Some estimates put the proportion of consumption due to standby power as high as 13%.

In July of 2001, President George W. Bush signed an Executive Order directing federal agencies to "purchase products that use no more than one watt in their standby power consuming mode."