In discussing the impact of the agreement’s increased savings, Doug Johnson, CTA’s vice president of technology policy, says, “A 40% decline in the entire energy footprint of a category in only six years is a remarkable achievement that demonstrates the effectiveness of voluntary agreements.”
In 2018, the report’s most recent year, consumers saved roughly $1.6 billion in energy costs as a result of the voluntary agreement – up from $950 million in 2017 – and reduced their energy consumption as significantly. According to independent auditor D+R International, consumers have avoided a total of 28.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions and reduced national set-top box annual energy consumption by 39% in the six years since launching. The energy saved during this period is enough to power all homes in the state of Pennsylvania for one year.
D+R also found 97.8% of service providers’ set-top box purchases in 2018 met the Agreement’s “Tier 2” levels established in 2017, exceeding its goal of 90% of new purchases meeting those levels. And even with more rigorous “Tier 3” levels scheduled to take effect in 2020,
78% of the signatories’ 2018 purchases have already met these levels.
Now consumers often watch video content through sources other than an operator supplied set-top box – resulting in agreement signatories purchasing only half as many new set-top boxes in 2018 compared to 2014. According to the independent report, consumers used more
than 36 million customer owned devices such as smart TVs, smartphones, tablets, personal computers and streaming devices such as Apple TV, Roku, Google Chromecast and Amazon Fire to access the providers’ video services via apps in 2018 – up by 33% (27 million) from 2017.
According to Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The voluntary agreement accelerated a nationwide shift to more energy efficient set top boxes, and consumers and the environment are seeing big benefits.”
To learn more about the industry’s voluntary agreements and energy efficiency efforts, visit www.energy-efficiency.us.
i3, the flagship magazine from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®, focuses on innovation in technology, policy and business as well as the entrepreneurs, industry leaders and startups that grow the consumer technology industry. Subscriptions to i3 are available free to qualified participants in the consumer electronics industry.