Back at the beginning of this year, I blogged about the historic STB Energy Efficiency Voluntary Agreement. Today, the signatories of VA announced the release of their first annual report, and they are already making significant progress. CableLabs is proud to be a part of this important initiative. Let me recap what has happened over the past 8+ months:
- All service providers signators are required to post the energy information about their STBs purchased beginning January 1, 2014. CableLabs is hosting this information for the 6 cable signatories at http://energy.cablelabs.com.
- The procurement commitment is to purchase at least 90% of STBs that meet ENERGY STAR version 3.0 standards, beginning January 1, 2014. However, the VA still included a procurement report of purchases made in 2013. Even in 2013, the 11 service providers (across cable, satellite, and telco) had 85% of their purchases meet the ENERGY STAR 3.0 energy efficiency levels.
- Cable operators rolled out software to over 14 million existing STBs to enable auto power down capability.
- CableLabs supported the cable operators with STB energy measurement collection and reporting to the Independent Administrator. All reports were submitted on time and fully complete.
- The VA also calls for a field verification by an independent third party auditor who will test STB energy consumption in over 80 homes across the US. CableLabs hosted a training event for the independent auditor and service technicians from all the service providers. The field verification will begin at the end of September.
The VA has already resulted in substantial energy savings for our country. In 2013, the VA resulted in reduced annual STB energy consumption by 1.4 TWh, representing a savings of approximately $168 million and CO2 savings of 842,000 metric tons. And all these savings are occurring while deployed stock is increasing, and exciting new features are being rolled out by the service providers.
Debbie Fitzgerald is Director of Client Application Technologies at CableLabs. Part of her responsibilities is to lead the Energy Management Program at CableLabs, working with cable operators and manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of the cable consumer premises equipment (CPE).