Today, you can
walk into a store and get a nice, big, flat-screen TV that uses one-third the
energy of older models and has better features. You can get a powerful 14-inch
laptop that uses a lot less energy than a machine built a few years ago — it
has longer battery life and an even brighter display. But your high-speed modem
and router — those little blinking boxes that you use to stream video, get
email and zap a document to your wireless printer — could be eating up as much
energy as your TV, and twice as much as your laptop.What a waste.
There's
no need for the devices to guzzle power all day and night. Some manufacturers
are already using power-scaling technology, which allows the device to use less
power when it's just sitting around waiting to receive or send data, without
sacrificing speed or convenience. Next year, these efficient modems and routers
will bear the blue Energy Star label. You can find them on store shelves, or
ask your Internet service provider to swap out your old device for an Energy
Star model as part of your subscription package.
When you do so, you'll save money on your electric bill, and help
reduce pollution from power plants. On a large scale, replacing old modems and
routers with models that are among the 25 percent that are the most efficient
in their category would save consumers $330 million on electric bills every
year.
All this from a small tweak to a little black box. That's what's
so great about energy efficiency — like those unassuming modems and
routers, it's so humble, yet such a powerful tool. Energy efficiency puts money
back in people's pockets, and it's the cheapest, cleanest, fastest way to
reduce g
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