[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: Boulders Energy Future and the Comcast Franchise

[cmosupport at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Cowles, Macon

Cable Boxes/video recorders use prodigious amounts of energy and they are on all the time. The lead sentence in a NYT article on this subject in June 2011 puts the issue bluntly:

"Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems."

See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26cable.html?pagewanted=all

Cable providers countrywide are aware of this, but the industry has taken no steps in the United States to make boxes that use less energy because, as one industry rep stated to the California Energy Commission, "“Nobody asked us to use less.” Id.

I would like to ask my colleagues to think about whether we should require Comcast, as a condition of renewing the franchise, to meet objective measures of energy efficiency.

Macon Cowles
Boulder City Councilor