Your iPhone uses more energy than a refrigerator
And smartphone energy consumption is only going to
increase
By Carmel Lobello | August 14,
2013
Charging up this puppy comes at a cost.
Illustration
by Lauren Hansen | Images courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images, CC
BY: renaissancechambara
How
much energy does it take to power your smartphone addiction?
The
average iPhone uses more energy than a midsize refrigerator, says a new paper
by Mark Mills, CEO of Digital Power Group, a tech investment advisory. A
midsize refrigerator that qualifies for the Environmental Protection Agency's
Energy Star rating uses about 322 kW-h a year, while your iPhone uses about 361
kW-h if you stack up wireless connections, data usage, and battery charging.
The
paper, rather ominously titled "The Cloud Begins
With Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power,"
details how the world's Information Communication Technology (ITC) ecosystem —
which includes smartphones, those high-powered Bloomberg terminals on trading
floors, and server farms that span the size of seven football fields — are
taking up a larger and larger slice of the world's energy pie.
The
slice right now, according to Mills, is about 10 percent, or 1,500 terawatt
hours of energy per year. (For context, one terawatt hour is one trillion watt
hours, and one watt terawatt hour can power about 90,000 homes per
year) Much of that energy is going to server farms, those giant clusters of
computer servers that power "the cloud," as well as wireless
networks.
And
the ITC ecosystem is expected to require more energy as time goes on. Part of
the reason is that unlike a flashlight or an air conditioner, much of the technology
we're wired to never goes to sleep. Think about it: Who actually turns off
their cell phones at night?
On top
of that, our devices are requiring more and more power. "As anyone who has
ever tried to husband the battery of a dying smartphone knows, transmitting
wireless data — whether via 3G or wi-fi — adds significantly to power use. As
the cloud grows bigger and bigger, and we put more and more of our devices on
wireless networks, we’ll need more and more electricity," says Bryan Walsh
at TIME.
All
added up, Mills calculates that it now takes more energy to stream a high-def
movie than to manufacture and ship a DVD of the same film.
So
where does coal come into the equation? To start with, the National Mining
Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity sponsored
Mills' study. Coal is still the largest source of electricity in the world, so
it's safe to say it's playing a huge role in keeping us connected.
Says
Mills: “Coal’s dominance arises from the importance of keeping costs down while
providing ever-greater quantities of energy to the growing economies, and as
the IEA recently noted, the absence of cost-effective alternatives at the
scales the world needs.”
The
only fix, however, is to keep developing alternatives, says Breakthrough:
If
Mills is right that ICT will fundamentally change the way we use electricity —
by putting a premium on reliable, round-the-clock power generation — we need to
be thinking seriously about how we can power the information sector with
cheaper, cleaner alternatives to coal. This will require making technologies
that can provide reliable, baseload power cheaper and more readily available. [Breakthrough]
Carmel Lobello is the
business editor at TheWeek.com. Previously, she was an editor atDeathandTaxesMag.com and
the style editor at Death + Taxes Magazine. She once made a pretty
good living as a car insurance telemarketer.
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