[Satellite News 08-29-08] Pace is the latest company in the satellite industry to announce it is going green. According to the company, its new environmentally friendly product line could lead to significant cost and energy savings in both the U.S. and Europe, particularly if other vendors and manufacturers follow suit and comply with energy regulations.
    The set-top box vendor, which works with a number of the biggest satellite pay-TV operators across the world, announced earlier this week (August 26) an initiative to make its products and manufacturing processes more environmentally friendly.
    Pace is targeting three areas to make its products more environmentally friendly.
    In terms of power consumption, the company said that the hardware design of every Pace product from this point onwards will comply with or exceed the EU Code of Conduct, EnergyStar and MEPS guidelines.  In regions where no guidelines exist, Pace will apply the closest guidelines to these areas.  Pace will work with its key partners to drive compliance across all aspects of the final product, including software.
    Pace looks at packaging as the second area of concern. The company said that all materials used in the packaging of Pace products will be 100 percent recyclable.  Pace is setting a minimum standard of 50 percent of all materials used in packaging to be sourced from recycled materials.
    To address reducing potentially hazardous substances, Pace said it aims to go beyond current legislation with its own extensive ‘Restricted Substances’ list.  Pace will phase out these additional hazardous substances from all future products going forward.
    What does all this mean in practical terms? Pace’s head of business integration, Dave Stollery, told Satellite News about the differences these initiatives could help make in terms of energy and costs savings in Europe and the U.S., in particular.
    “The latest version of the EU Code of Conduct states that ‘equipment for the reception, decoding and interactive processing of digital broadcasting and related services will contribute substantially to the electricity consumption of households in European Community in the near future,” said Stollery.
    “Depending on the penetration level, the specifications of the equipment and the requirements of the service provider, a total European consumption of up to 23 TWh per year can be estimated. With the general principles and actions resulting from the implementation of this Code of Conduct the (maximum) electricity consumption could be limited to 15 TWh per year, this is equivalent to total savings of about 750 million euros ($1.1 billion) per year.”
    Putting this initiative into context of what it means in the U.S., the numbers make interesting reading. When discussing the U.S. perspective, Stollery examines the Digital to Analog (DTA) converter.
    “It is estimated that consumers across the U.S. will purchase as many as 22 million converter boxes, leading up to and immediately following the transition to all-digital broadcasting,” said Stollery. “In the U.S. alone, depending on viewer behavior and product design, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that conventional DTAs could consume more than 3 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) per year and cost Americans $270 million annually in additional electricity bills. 
    He continued, “However, products that earn the EnergyStar rating will consume no more than 8 watts in On Mode and 1 watt in Sleep Mode and automatically power down after 4 hours or less of user inactivity. If all manufacturers’ DTA converter boxes sold in the U.S. met the EnergyStar specification, over the lifetime of the products, Americans could save approximately 13 billion kWh and $1 billion in energy costs — reducing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking more than one million cars off the road.”
    In terms of whether this gives Pace a competitive advantage over its rivals and whether it will help them generate extra business, Stollery commented, “Pace has always been an environmentally aware company. Our track record shows that we have been working this way for years, well before the industry started to wake up to these issues and so we are able to stand by our record, improve on it and lead the way for our industry. Certainly, in the present climate this may also give us some differences to our competitors, but from our point of view, that’s a welcome side-effect of the work that we have been doing for years.”