With the World Cup expected to provide a sales boost for television manufacturers, Hannah Hislop of the Green Alliance warns poor energy labelling will make it difficult for football fans to pick the greenest models.
By Hannah Hislop, Green Alliance
(Article originally published on Business Green)
In the run up to the 2006 World Cup, sales of large, flat screen televisions showed an increase of 80 per cent on the same week in 2005. Television manufacturers are hoping for equally good results this summer. But televisions are getting bigger and more energy hungry all the time, and consume a surprisingly large amount of energy compared to other household appliances. The yearly running cost of a large plasma TV has been estimated at nearly £60, almost double that of a fridge freezer.
When it comes to televisions and energy consumption, size matters! Doubling the diagonal of the screen can almost quadruple the amount of energy a set consumes. The total energy consumption of TVs is also being pushed up by the trend towards two sets per household and new display technologies with higher resolution and picture quality.
And televisions are getting bigger: as recently as 2003, TV sets over 40 inches were a tiny percentage of total sales, but even by 2007, 20 per cent of TV sales in the EU were those over 40 inches, with many a whopping 70 inches as people try to turn their living rooms into cinemas without thinking about the consequences on their electricity bills and the climate.
The EU energy label, which gives energy-using products an energy efficiency rating, should present a significant opportunity to help consumers make greener choices when purchasing a new television. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily shaping up that way.
Firstly, the energy label rating is largely based on energy consumption per square centimetre, which means that a massive TV could be given a high energy efficiency rating even if it consumes much more energy than a smaller set. A set's absolute energy consumption over the course of a year will be recorded on the label, but most consumers will only look at the coloured A-G scale and make the assumption that a big A-rated model will mean lower energy bills, which will not be the case in comparison to a smaller, C-rated model for example.
Secondly, thanks to industry pressure, the effective A-G label has been watered down, with the addition of confusing A+, A++ and A+++ classes on top of the A class as products improve, rather than rescaling to ensure that only the very best products receive an A.
To add insult to injury, television manufacturers are currently trying to water down still further the already unambitious energy label scale proposed by the European Commission, which would give high ratings to far too many products on the market. Examining current market data, green technology website topten.info spotted that nearly 30 of today's models would already get a B rating on the current scale, and 16 would get an A rating. No products would fall into the bottom three classes (E, F and G) within a year and a half of the label coming into force, meaning that a C or D rated appliance will be one of the very least efficient, but won't look it because of its position in the middle of the scale.
This is why environmental and consumer groups are calling on the EU Commission to make the label a genuinely useful tool for people who want to make greener choices by ensuring that only the most efficient products are rewarded with a high rating, and that extra classes above A are not needed for several years. This year's World Cup is expected to have a carbon footprint of 2.7 million tonnes – consumers expect their TV to be part of the solution, not the problem.