The culprit for your explosive bills may be the seemingly most inoffensive and smallest item in your house. Forget the huge AAA refrigerator, washing machine or air conditioner. The answer lies in your pocket and has the features of a smartphone.
When we talk about energy efficiency, we hardly think of mobile phones. Yet the often overlooked telecommunications sector has become particularly voracious, as the latest Digital Power Group report points out.
The dossier reveals that the burgeoning smartphone industry increasingly needs energy to feed the relentless race for innovation: electricity that comes mainly from coal, the primary source in the United States.
According to calculations by the Digital Power Group, an iPhone consumes more than a refrigerator: 361 kilowatt hours against 322, taking into account battery, wifi, downloads and data exchange. In general, the telecommunications sector accounts for 10 percent of world electricity production, with 1500 terawatt hours of consumption per year. The equivalent of the entire production of Germany or Japan.
“We now use 50 percent more energy to move bytes to move planes around the world,” notes the Time.
According to the American newspaper, the room for maneuver to deal with the energy-intensive monster is still limited. It is easier to increase the efficiency – with the same performance – of a light bulb or an air conditioner, rather than that of a mobile device, which is forced to work non-stop.
Consumption, moreover, will continue to grow, with increasingly powerful appliances that rely on wireless technologies, the most energy-intensive. Watching a high-definition movie streaming over Wi-Fi is more expensive than producing and transporting a DVD. And the number of connected users, increased by 20 times in the last five years, will exceed – again according to Time – one billion people.
