Low-carbon living starts with the little things! The big terminal board on my computer desk is full of outlets, and every time I turn off the lights and leave at night, there's always a piece of the power adapter's red and green lights glowing on the dark desktop. I don't know if you are used to unplugging unused power adapters at any time, but have you ever thought that these idle adapters are consuming energy for nothing?
Take a cell phone for example, its power consumption when charging is about 4W, and the power adapter standby power consumption is 0.5W (really not much, much smaller than a light bulb). A typical user might accumulate 7 hours of charging per week, and if the power adapter is not unplugged, the adapter will be on standby for 161 hours. Accounting for each year, charging a cell phone will consume 1.456 kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity, while standby will use 4.186 kWh. According to the price of 0.48 yuan per kilowatt-hour in Beijing, each power adapter will be busy a year because of the ineffective consumption of standby will cost you more than 2 dollars. It seems like a lot of trouble to unplug it every time you use it. But if you look at the global perspective, these ineffective consumption is a staggering figure. 2009 annual global sales of cell phones is about 1.211 billion, if 10% of the users do not unplug the power adapter, each year will consume 500 million kWh of electricity, about 240 million yuan. If you add digital cameras, MP3 / MP4, camcorders, laptops and so on a bunch of always plugged into the terminal board power adapter, or according to the 10% estimate, standby state of the total power consumption will reach about 1 billion degrees! It is really a tower of sand into a tower ah! Hundreds of millions of kilowatts! This figure is shocking enough, 1 billion kWh is enough to support the electricity consumption of about 1 million typical Chinese households, if converted to carbon emissions, these electricity will add 7.85 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, about 8.2 million trees are needed to absorb. However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. The standby power consumption of products such as televisions, DVD players, set-top boxes, etc. is usually less than 1W, and few people will have the habit of completely turning off the power of these audio-visual products, most of which are turned off to standby mode with the remote control.
