Power hungry digital boards
There is an interesting conflict that’s horribly at odds to the ‘Green LA’ message that Mayor Villaraigosa is sending us and the ”Green Energy conservation” message from the Los Angeles Department of Water Power.
The department of water and power wants its residents to “conserve electricity” by replacing incandescent light bulbs in favor of those curly little 20 watt fluorescent bulbs and for awhile they were even giving out these little bulbs to prod us towards conservation.
However, conflicting with this message has been the last years approval by the city council and the mayor (with some encouragement from the city attorney) to permit 840 standard billboards to be converted to ’digital’. Essentially oversized and logically power hungry TV’s.
A 14 foot by 48 foot billboard filled with 322,000 LED’s as opposed to one equipt with three or four halogen lights had to be a significant user of energy given the sheer number of LED’s. So I did some research into the billboards that Clear Channel is putting up and their power consumption. The numbers were astounding.
So how much energy do those digital boards consume?
First lets look at something that we can compare their consumption to, the average home. According to answers.yahoo.com, the average home uses about 1000 watts per hour. You can check your DWP bill to see how much electricity you use at home. Near the bottom of your bill you can find your Daily Average. Our homes average is 25 kWh per day.
A Clear Channel digital billboard uses about 20,832 watts or 500 kWh per day. So a digital billboard uses roughly 20x the power a single family residence in a given day.
A static (non digital) single board billboard is rated at 900 watts since they use only halogen flood lights and just as importantly, they only require power at night. Digitals on the otherhand use power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Which is greener?
The bottom line?
- The average home uses 24,000 watts a day.
- A digital billboard consumes in one hour what a typical home uses in 24 hours.
- A digital billboard uses 500,112 watts a day – (That is equal to 20 average homes)
- 840 digital billboards use enough electricity to supply 17,500 homes.
- A single ‘standard’ billboard only uses about 9000 watts per day.
Westchester now has four of these billboards consuming enough electricity to supply 80 homes.
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