Inventing the self-winding phone

On its own, your phone charger may not be draining a large portion of the world’s energy resources, but the collective drain of the planet’s 4 billion–plus phones pack quite a punch. In her latest Green Phone Series installment, “Stemming the mobile phone power drain,”Telephony Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy cites some rather interesting figures: In the next five years, North Americans will use 2.5 billion handheld device chargers, which will draw enough electricity to generate 9 billion kilograms of carbon emissions.

To put that in perspective, charging your phone over the next five years will add 3.6 kilos of CO2 to the atmosphere, which is less than half of what a single of gallon of gasoline produces in your car. Your mobile phone certainly isn’t leading the march to global warming — driving to the grocery store creates more emissions than a phone does in a year — but then again there aren’t 2.5 billion cars in North America. As the wireless industry evolves, though, we’ll be embedding more radios in more devices until, presumably, we’ll live in world where almost every conceivable object is interactive and networked — and each will have its own power demands. The mobile device’s contribution to the world’s energy and environmental crisis may not be excessive today, but it’s setting itself up to be a much bigger factor in the future.

The irony of the situation is that wireless is one of the few industries perfectly positioned to adapt to new green technologies. Unlike the automotive sector, which has massive built-in infrastructure that would take decades to transform, the mobile device market reinvents itself every year. Reducing the environmental impact of turning over billions of devices every year presents its own problems, but introducing a new generation of power technologies doesn’t face the same hurdles as, say, popularizing an electric car. If every vendor made their chargers EnergyStar compliant, they’d penetrate the vast majority of the market within a few years.

But what about looking beyond the wall socket? The wireless industry is introducing solar, wind and fuel cell technologies to the network. Will the same technologies apply to devices? We’ve already see concept phones that have solar cells that can draw some energy from their environments, but will we ever have “self-winding” phones — devices that can be taken off of the electricity grid completely?

Sarah interviewed a few of the companies trying to tackle that problem through implementing alternative power sources in the charger, if not the phone itself. Better Energy Systems has produced a charger that can generate a full phone charge through solar cells. Motion 2 Energy Power is developing electromagnetic field technology that converts kinetic energy from normal motion into stored electrical energy. These technologies are still far away from powering the self-sufficient phone, but the concept isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. The major handset vendors have begun investigating such energy-scavenging techniques in their labs. Light and movement are just two possible alternatives. Someday our handsets may get part of their power from the network itself, as ambient radio waves transfer their energy directly to devices.

Note: Telephony has launched its next interactive feature, examining the future of the telecom workforce and how it has had to adapt — not just in the face of the sour economy, but also in the face of an evolving industry. Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson has posted her first piece on the telecom industry being unprepared for new IP realities. If you’re still unfamiliar with the concept of the interactive feature, you can read more about the direction of the feature in Executive News Editor Ed Gubbins’ introduction on the Unfiltered blog.

E-mail me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.