Attack Of The Power Adaptors

Power adapters, those blocky lumps you find somewhere on the power cables of most small electrical devices, are everywhere. Printers, routers, laptops, games consoles, mobile phone chargers and so on. There are currently 6 to 10 billion of them in use around the world with 1 billion sold every year. That's an awful lot of adapters.

So many, in fact, that, in the U.S. alone, they consume $17 billion worth of electric, or 6% of their national electric bill.

The problem is that many of them are very inefficient. Have you ever noticed how hot they can get? That's because the manufacturers are often more interested in making them cheap rather than efficient. All that heat is effectively just wasted electricity. So the manufacturers save money and you pay for it on your electric bills.

There are standards for adapters of course, good ones, but they're not compulsory. A shame really: Analysis from the University of California says that ""Even with modest gains in market penetration (from Energy Star standards [A U.S. energy efficiency rating], they would) save a cumulative 24 billion kWh of electricity by 2025. With slightly higher market penetrations and the additional impact of California standards, savings increase to 64 tWh through 2025. Adding a U.S. national standard could save 180 tWh over the same period.".

Imagine if the whole world had such a standard? In fact, why doesn't the world have such a standard? It would be such a simple thing. All that electric saved, the savings on people's bills, and the reduction in carbon emissions. Funny how such simple measures never happen.

Source article here.