Big TVs = Big electric bills
Want to know why your electric bill's been soaring lately? No, it's not because you've got the AC cranked at 68 degrees in response to this freaking heat wave that's been hitting the Northeast. According to a recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council it's because of that ginormous TV set you just bought. We always figured that LCDs and plasmas used less power than CRTs, but apparently digital HDTVs actually suck up more power than analog TVs (see the chart below), and to make matters worse, we're buying bigger and bigger television sets than we used to. They're predicting that in four years our TVs will be consuming 50% more power per year than they do today, what worries them is that hardly anyone thinks about how much power their TV is going to use when they're buying it (we certainly don't), so they're trying to get manufacturers to make their displays more energy efficient and are asking the EPA to establish a single annual energy-consumption number for TVs that's sort of like the one they already have for air conditioners.
[Via TechDirt]
