The Last Word On Nothing

Your cable company is screwing you. You already knew that, of course. You’ve seen your cable bill. But I want to tell you about a less obvious way that they’re sucking your bank account dry. They’re doing it through the cable box.

I don’t have cable, but I used to. And what I miss most about the service is the box. That box was magic: I could record my favorite shows. I could pause a show midstream and refill my wine glass. I could fast forward through Kia commercials with their creepy gangs of hip hamsters. I could (gasp!) even rewind. It was television viewing at its goddamned finest. I watched what I wanted when I wanted.

Now I get my TV shows via an antenna. And once a moment has passed, it’s gone. There’s no going back. There’s no avoiding the commercials. There’s no watching what I want when I want.

But I recently learned that the box’s magic comes at a price. Those slim little devices are energy guzzlers. Fancy boxes like the one I had, those that deliver HD and allow you to record, consume between 20 and 45 watts, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Council estimates that the average household (which has one HD-DVR device and one HD box) uses 446 kilowatt hours of energy each year to power their boxes.  That’s more than an Energy Star refrigerator requires. Why?! My cable box isn’t freezing chicken or chilling beer. What the hell!The problem is that many cable and satellite boxes—or “set-top boxes,” as the industry calls them—draw the same amount of power whether they’re on or off. Pushing the power button may dim the clock light, but the interior components keep clicking away. There are benefits to this, of course. For example, the DVR can record constantly, providing a cushion that allows you to rewind a bit if you miss the beginning of The Bachelor. And the device doesn’t have to download program guides every time you turn it on; it can keep them at the ready. But there are power-saving workarounds for many of these features. And even if there weren’t, shouldn’t I, the consumer, be able to choose whether I care more about energy consumption or the first 15 minutes of The Bachelor. (Answer: energy consumption).

Last year, cable and satellite companies decided to address the problem. In December they signed a voluntary agreement to improve set-top box efficiency by 10 to 45 percent by 2017. NRDC called the agreement “historic.” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said, “The set-top box efficiency standards will save families money by saving energy, while delivering high quality appliances for consumers that keep pace with technological innovation.” Senator Dianne Feinstein called the agreement “a big win for nearly every American who pays a monthly television bill.”

Everyone seems excited about the deal. Everyone, that is, except for former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. “If I was the Secretary of Energy, I can guarantee you I would never have signed off on that. That was atrocious,” Chu said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier this month.

Chu thinks the box manufacturers can do better. And he has some ideas for how. I’ll let science journalist XiaoZhi explain because she seems to have understood Chu’s idea better than I did: “Most of us don’t watch TV in the middle of the night, so the box could be completely powered down while we sleep. A clock mechanism, like crystal oscillators found in digital watches, paired with memory space could be set up to have the box download the programming in the middle of the night so that we have TV right away when we want to watch it in the daytime,” she writes.

Chu estimates that change would bring the device’s energy consumption down from about 30 Watts to between 1 and 3 Watts. I’m no engineer, but that sounds pretty good. No wonder Chu was miffed when he saw the agreement. A 45% improvement in efficiency on a device that uses 30 watts gives us a device that uses 16.5 watts. That’s a far cry from the 1 to 3 watts Chu was hoping for. The agreement is an example of what can happen “if you don’t have someone who knows technically what’s going on at a high enough position,” Chu said. “There’s too much pressure and they caved, or they just didn’t know,” he added. “The technical guys in the companies can bullshit the government people.”

Here’s what I want to know: Why are we letting industries set their own energy efficiency standards? Shouldn’t we ask scientists and engineers what efficiency gains are feasible and then make regulations based on their answers? We’re on the cusp of catastrophic climate change, driven in part by CO2 emissions from the coal plants that produce our power. Energy efficiency alone won’t save us, but it can help curb emissions. However, we need more than modest gains.

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Image courtesy of MaryAnnS on Flickr, which features an astounding variety of photos of cats on cable boxes. (This one might be the most disturbing.) I assume they’re attracted to the warmth. And of course I forgot to talk about the impact these efficiency gains will have on cats. More efficient boxes will generate less heat, and provide a less attractive napping pad for cats. There’s always some drawback, isn’t there?