A number of people at the Flat Panel Display conference talked about issues involved in making displays more environmentally friendly. This included ways of both reducing the power consumption of displays and making displays in a more environmentally friendly process.
DisplaySearch's Charles Annis noted that "Green" has become a buzzword, but that in practice it means a lot of different things from using more environmentally friendly materials to reducing power consumption. He said some Green claims are just marketing, but some of the assertions are real. Reducing power consumption is of particular importance, he said, because it is a "win-win" improvement that also typically lowers cost.
Despite fact that flat panel displays use less power than similar sized CRTs, these displays are enabling larger and brighter TVs. Combined with faster unit growth, this results increased power consumption, Annis said.
Noah Horowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council said that consumer electronics were the fastest growing source of electricity use in the home, in part because people have more electronics, but also in part because other end-uses, such as heating and air-conditioning systems and refrigerators are getting more efficient. TVs currently take 1 percent of national electricity use, but other devices such as computers, game players and DVRs also represent a significant energy draw, particularly if they are not turned off.
He said dramatic energy savings in TVs were possible with little to no incremental total cost, through things like using more efficient or fewer backlights, along with high-efficiency optical films that then allow for smaller power supplies. For instance, he talked about the TVs manufacturing were showing at CES, including a 55" LED backlight TV using the same power as a 32-inch traditional LCD; and how Panasonic was now showing Plasma TVs that promise a 3X reduction in power use. (Plasma sets have historically drawn more power than LCD ones.)
He talked about how standards are being tightened for energy efficiency in TVs, including a tightening of the Energy Star specification later in the year and new standards proposed for California, which by itself could eliminate the need for a 500 megawatt power plant. Horowitz said TVs are typically coming with a much brighter setting than they need, but there's still a lot of work to be done in getting the settings and brightness levels right.
Annis talked about a number of things manufacturers were doing to reduce power consumption including improving the transmissivity (the amount of light the backlight puts out that actually makes it through to the final image). He talked about a number of different methods for improving this.
For instance, in another presentation, David Wortman of 3M talked about the company's Vikuiti brightness enhancement films, and how they allow TV makers to use less backlighting and still get the same about of brightness, while using a lot less power. He said the films can reduce power used by the backlight by 52 percent and the overall TV power by 37%. If you just took TVs sold in the U.S. in 2007, the potential energy savings would be 3 billion kilowatt-hours, he said.
Bruce Berkoff of the LCD TV Association talked about some of the specific things vendors were working on, such as reducing the backlighting in dark scenes, or in dark rooms via an ambient light sensor; the coming movement toward more energy-efficient LED backlighting; and lower power standby modes and modes for showing digital photos;. He talked about how LG's 240 Hz displays, which it achieves by making the backlight strobe on and off, can not only improve the apparent speed of a display to 240Hz, it can save power.
He also talked about being greener in terms of materials was happening, though things such as using LEC backlighting (which doesn't use mercury, unlike traditional fluorescent backlighting) and Corning's new glass types, which have less heavy metals.
Frank Ko of AUO, the largest Taiwanese LCD panel maker, talked about the company's plans for reducing the amount of mercury and halogen used in its displays, by reducing the number of fluorescent backlights, reducing the metals in those backlights, and eventually replacing them with LED backlights. At the same time, the company is trying to reduce power consumption of its displays by 40 to 50 percent.