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Noah Horowitz is the brains behind NRDC's efforts to reduce energy use by electronics and appliances.
The SUV has become the gas-guzzling poster child of American wastefulness, the villain of climate change. But there's a more insidious energy-guzzler sitting in your living room. It's your TV.
Our national love affair with television has never been stronger, what with those sexy flat-screen, high-definition models now flooding the market. Americans collectively own some 266 million working televisions, a number that's expected to grow by 3.5 percent a year. At that rate, televisions will outnumber humans in the United States by 2010. Sounds like the premise of a bad sci-fi movie, but the environmental consequences are real: Televisions currently consume about 4 percent of all residential electricity, most of which is generated by conventional coal-fired power plants spewing global warming pollution into the air.
For Noah Horowitz, an NRDC scientist whose work focuses on improving the efficiency of common energy-sucking gizmos and appliances, from vending machines to lightbulbs, slashing electricity consumption by televisions presents an interesting challenge. Big high-definition TVs consume considerably more energy than their fuzzy, outdated brethren. What's more, watching an action-packed animated film like Pixar's Monsters, Inc. requires more juice than watching Citizen Kane or some other black-and-white Hollywood classic; powering all those ultrasharp pixels adds up. And as is the case with most electronics, televisions use energy even when they're switched off.
Horowitz, whose career in science began when he was a chemical engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University, is now a bona-fide electronics geek with an environmental bent. Over the past several years, he helped write government standards for those little black power-supply units that con-vert the high-voltage AC current coming out of wall sockets into the low-voltage DC current that powers most appliances, including iPods, cell phones, and laptops. There are 1.5 billion such devices in the United States alone, and thanks to Horowitz's work, the next generation of them will use a lot less energy, preventing 3.8 million tons of global warming pollution from entering the atmosphere each year. For this, one of the nation's foremost authorities on energy efficiency, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, honored Horowitz and his collaborators with its top award last year -- the Nobel Prize of the field.
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