The Oil Drum: Europe

Assuming the Energy Review endorses such proposals for greatly reduced power requirements for equipment in standby mode, banning of incandescent light bulbs etc we must expect manufacturers to lobby heavily for lenghty timescales to phase-in such changes.  There is also a major (and fast growing) problem of legacy household electronic equipment - one would hardly expect to see BSkyB voluntarily giving away replacement digi-boxes to existing subscriber base which I recall is already around 9m with 10m target in relatively near term.  Not least many on this forum, including myself, see recession as a likely outcome of the ongoing energy situation and in a recession households will be much less able to afford replacement of equipment which still has years of useful life.

Incidentally the problem of legacy equipment is potentially even worse for domestic gas fired boilers which are much longer lasting and considerably more expensive to replace than consumer electronics; furthermore they are more vital in that one can more readily do without electronic equipment than heating.  As UK gas supplies become more expensive and potentially scarcer recession-hit households are likely to experience difficulties funding increased gas charges.

The recommendations submitted by PowerSwitch to the Energy Review should be implemented without delay; such action should have been taken years ago before such a large base of energy hungry legacy equipment was allowed to accumulate.  We need to go much further and introduce inverted energy tariffs now whereby households are allocated a block of gas / electricity units up to 50% of average domestic consumption at a low tariff with rates for units in excess of this level incurring progressively much higher tariffs.  In this way households using (say) 200% of average consumption will find themselves paying 400% of average bills versus current c80%.  This change would eliminate the abusrd situation where currently proliferate consumption is rewarded by lower unit tariffs.

On a practical level I've wired my PC and peripherals via a 13 socket strip with the switch in easy reach thus everything can be turned off when not in use.  Achieving the same result for digi-boxes, VCR and DVD recorders etc is far more problematic as the equipment is designed to be powered 24/7 - digiboxes actually go thru a lengthy power up sequence including a system demo and I can't see many households being prepared to sit through such a start-up sequence every day not to mention having to reset preferences on recording equipment etc.  Even so, inverted energy tariffs and rising utility bills may well focus the mind!

My understanding is that compact fluorescents do not work with dimmer switches. This makes an outright ban a little tricky. Is there another low consumption light bulb out there that does operate with a dimmer switch?