I hadn't previously given this much thought, but it makes sense. More people buying increasingly affordable big-screen televisions is going to skyrocket the nation's electrical consumption. People don't realize how much electrical demand is driven by computers and server farms, but this is a new application for the home that will start to exceed the electricity used by multiple computers and home networking.

Of course, I only have the television on when I'm watching, whereas I rarely turn the computers off.

You're right.

I've measured the usage of 42 to 50 inch flat panel TVs and they use 400-500 watts when running. (depending on whats on the screen actually).

My electricity bill in my apartment went up about $10/month after i bought one. (i had no tv before though, so it might not be a fair comparison because almost everyone has a TV now they're replacing with one of these). However a 27 inch tube tv uses about 150-200 watts, so a 42 inch plasma pretty much doubles it.

Good news is: when LCDs come down and price and peopel switch to those, they use *less* power. So this effect may not last that long.

-jcp-

My impression of the article is that it was written to scare people. For all the facts and figures it contains, the author manages to avoid providing any actual power consumtion estimates other than in aggregate. This seems designed to generate big scary power consumption figures, rather than something that can be used to figure out what typical operating costs would be.

If the author provided the type of information that commenter Joe did in the previous post, it would be trivial to multiply the power consumption (half a kW, as per Joe) by the cost per kW-hr (about seven cents per kW-hr here in the Baltimore-Washington area) to figure out that it costs under a nickel per hour to operate even the largest big-screen TV.

These few cents per hour aren't likely to phase someone who has just shelled out the several thousand dollars that one of these units costs. That's dirt cheap -- both in dollars and in terms of energy consumption -- compared to just about any other form of entertainment.

I hope that the article doesn't scare anyone into loading the family into the SUV and burning up a few gallons of gas to pay to watch a movie in the local theatre in a misguided hope that they'll be saving money or energy in the process.

Plasma does use lots of juice, but LCDs are better. It will only be a matter of time until LCDs get large enough to displace Plasmas. Plasma screens have lousy contrast anyway.

In addition to electro-dudes good response, I note that most big screens aren't flat screen, they're DLP. Once the DLP big screen HDTVs are illuminated by LEDs, the power consumption will go way down.

Don't forget the "Always On" or "Instant On" capability we take for granted. Something is always drawing current so we don't need to wait 45 seconds for a picture to appear.

And don't discount the air conditioning necessitated by the hot air generated by a non-LCD TV.