GE to Super Bowl Viewers: Here's How Much Juice Your TV Sucks
While you're sitting on the couch this Sunday popping cheese puffs and drinking wobbly-pops, consider this little GE-crafted factoid: The amount of energy that home TVs will use to watch the Super Bowl is enough to meet the energy needs of Dallas, Green Bay and Pittsburgh for 10 hours.
GE Energy took Nielsen data, geographical stats from the Energy Information Administration, electronic info published by ABS Alaskan and U.S. Census population numbers and determined that 11.3 million kilowatt-hours of energy will be used during the five-hour Super Bowl event. And that's just from TVs at home.
Sure, there are bigger Super Bowl energy suckers out there. The estimated 100,000 people expected to attend the game in Dallas had to get to the stadium somehow, and for most it wasn't on a bicycle. Plenty of attendees took a plane to get to Dallas for Super Bowl weekend. But the Super Bowl TV data gives us insight into how much energy we can consume just lounging around. It also shows there are some mighty big opportunities for companies developing energy efficiency technology.
That is, in fact, what GE has honed in on. Last month, the company launched the second phase of its $200 million ecomagination challenge -- an open call for ideas from businesses and individual entrepreneurs on how to more efficiently use energy in the home. GE has received more than 150 submissions including one for apartment buildings powered by a system wind turbines covering the entire facade as well as an idea for a solar driveway.
Scoff if you want, but GE has already given money to five challenge winners for their ideas on how to accelerate development of the next generation power grid. Each winner received $100,000 to develop their ideas. GE's ecomagination challenge also has awarded $55 million in clean-tech investments to 12 start-ups that had winning ideas that are ready for the market.
Come Sunday, it might just be worth spending all that down time -- think timeouts, replays, half-time show -- coming up with an idea to make homes more energy efficient. You have until March 1.
Photo from flickr user David Reber, CC 2.0; info-graphic from GE
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