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November 04, 2006
The power used by television
Decentralised energy - using waste heat, and encouraging individual home owners to generate electricity with solar panels and new boilers - could provide nearly 70 per cent of all Britain's electricity, and reduce emissions by as much as 60 per cent. The development of solar and and other micro generation technologies would, as a bonus, create thousands of jobs. But there's a snag. New generation televisions use far more power than the ones they replace. A friend of mine lives in a half-restored ruin up a mountain near us here in France. His water and power flows are all off-grid. But someone has given him an large Sony wide-screen plasma-screen tv which needs five times as much power to run as the cathode-ray tube model it replaces. He may need new, external power sources to run it. Can anyone from Philips or Sony tell me what your company plans to do about this?
Posted by John Thackara at November 4, 2006 08:40 AM
