This is progress, but in a small part of the power supply. It looks like they have a charge-pump type power supply, and they turn off the charge-level checking circuit except during polls. They also adjust the polling rate down when not much is happening. The question is how fast they can respond to a sudden demand for output power. Can a sudden load drain the capacitor before the input side notices and pumps it up again?
Excessive standby power consumption is a big problem. There are lots of devices, especially TVs, which consume far too much power when supposedly off. (Of course, some of them are constantly listening to you, phoning home, and possibly spying on you.)
One of the more important recent developments in switching power supplies is the elimination of electrolytic capacitors. They're the biggest point of failure. This is already happening in LED lightbulbs.[1][2] Electrolytic caps inside LED lamp units are the primary cause of failure. They only last about 10,000 to 20,000 hours, while high-output LEDs are good for 40,000 hours. If a power supply can be built with lower capacitance, ceramic capacitors can be used. That makes it possible to get the lifetime of all the power components above 100,000 hours, so the LEDs will burn out first.
> Excessive standby power consumption is a big problem. There are lots of devices, especially TVs, which consume far too much power when supposedly off
Is this really a problem anymore? I have a five year old 50" plasma, and it draws 0.12 W in standby. That's not "excessive", it's a rounding error. It's 1 kWh per year, or roughly 0.6 kg of CO2; the same as idling your car for an extra 2 seconds every day.
The mean power consumption is significantly higher than the median because the worst offenders are drawing tens of watts in standby mode. For example, this 4 year old Philips TV that is at 30 watts in standby: http://www.supportforum.philips.com/en/showthread.php?15754-...
Cable/satellite boxes also frequently draw multiple watts in standby or "off". If every bit of consumer electronics were as thrifty with standby as your TV, it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
(I'll add: my iPod Touch can "wake up" instantly when I interact with it after days sitting unplugged, and that's drawing from a tiny battery. Even 120 mW is far above the lower bound of what's necessary to build a complex device with fast wakeup upon user interaction.)
(Second edit: the power converter that started this discussion is obviously targeted at much lower power applications than even an iPod, so it's not really relevant to anything that can be plugged in at home.)
Just TVs. Just one type of consumer product needs a full Power Plant added to the earth every year to support their standby draw. Yes this assumes that a significant proportion will be plugged in, but it adds up.
Just TVs, not monitors, not computers, not audio receivers, not game consoles, not microwave ovens, not etc. I doubt the cost of designing this converter even approaches the yearly cost of a power plant.
200 GWh/year is a little less than 23 MW. A full power plant is on the order of several hundred MW to around a GW. You also don't need to replace the power plant every year. I agree that standby power usage is terribly wasteful but your calculation is off by a large factor.
Given the Jevons Paradox, we can predict that the lower energy use will translate to higher demand for IoT technologies, thus increasing the world energy requirements for these devices.
> That explains why most newer LED lamps flash at 120 Hz, slomo mode fails on cameras, and one gets wierd strobing effects with fast moving stuff...
Yes. I hate it when LED light output isn't continuous or visibly flickery, especially when it's from LED lights that are on (or are visible from) moving objects -- such as LED taillights on automobiles or in-road lane lights. All the eye movement (or object movement) makes the flicker even more flagrant :(
I remember extremely flickery lane lights on the leftmost lane markers on the infamous SR 110, on the northbound direction in the tunnels (the ones right before the left-exit to I-5 north).
You may or may not need to reduce the capacitance: modern multi-layer ceramic capacitors have very high capacitance values, allowing replacement of many other types of capacitors. It used to be that a 10uF capacitor was something you'd definitely need an electrolytic for (if not a tantalum), but now you can get that in a small surface-mount MLCC ceramic capacitor. Ceramics aren't limited to the picofarad ranges any more by a long shot.
True. I have some 1uF surface mount ceramic caps just in for a project of mine. I'm tempted to use this 220uF cap [1] to replace the only electrolytic on the board.
Just be sure to read the datasheet carefully. That particular capacitor is only ~120uF at typical 3.3V DC voltage. At 5V DC (which isn't really advisable for a 6.3V rated cap) it is only 88uF.
Amen. Modern solid state electronic gizmos should never fail, but they frequently do because of electrolytic caps. (The other reason they fail is inadequate thermal engineering. This happens so often I'm beginning to believe in "dark pattern" thermal engineering to ensure early failure.)
Excessive standby power consumption is a big problem. There are lots of devices, especially TVs, which consume far too much power when supposedly off. (Of course, some of them are constantly listening to you, phoning home, and possibly spying on you.)
One of the more important recent developments in switching power supplies is the elimination of electrolytic capacitors. They're the biggest point of failure. This is already happening in LED lightbulbs.[1][2] Electrolytic caps inside LED lamp units are the primary cause of failure. They only last about 10,000 to 20,000 hours, while high-output LEDs are good for 40,000 hours. If a power supply can be built with lower capacitance, ceramic capacitors can be used. That makes it possible to get the lifetime of all the power components above 100,000 hours, so the LEDs will burn out first.
[1] https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/164083/1/Content.pdf [2] www.rle.mit.edu/per/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Chen-Electrolytic-Free.pdf