DVR definitely makes life easier. Gone are the days of manually taping one show at a time onto clunky VHS casettes. With DVR, you don't have to pick a favorite show, you don't even have to be home to record it. Clearly, a genius invention. However this luxury, like most, comes at a price. Inactive boxes alone cost consumers about $2 billion a year in electricity. That's "the same amount of energy annually as is produced by nine coal-burning power plants," the Los Angeles Times points out today. A new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council discovered that "about 160 million digital video recorders and cable and other pay-TV boxes in the U.S. eat up 27 terawatt-hours of electricity a year and cost consumers about $3 billion." About $2 billion of that comes from inactive DVR sets alone! In fact, the study found that "with some form of pay-TV box in 80 percent of U.S. homes, the technology eats up as much electricity each year as all the homes in Maryland." 

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Caitlin Dickson