Right up front, I’m going to tell you this isn’t a political blog. We don’t dip our toes into that sort of thing. Why? Truth is, you can get your fill of politics in a lot of different places. We’re here to talk about the electronic stuff we love. And I’ll tell you also, that there’s a lot of politics involved in the matter of global climate change. I’ll leave it there other than to say that I believe everyone wants the planet we share to be pleasant, and we just may not agree on the best way to do it. Fine by me.
All that said…
There’s a certain contingent of people who will tell you that the impact of wirelessly charging your cell phone is going to kill the planet. Why? Because wireless charging is inefficient, and it doesn’t matter how inefficient it is, you take a tiny inefficiency and multiply it by the roughly 15,000,000,000 (yes, fifteen billion) cell phones in the world and my friend, you got trouble right here in the Electric City.
And I don’t dispute that. I just dispute whether it’s really making a difference. Let’s look at the math.
Why wireless charging is inefficient
Wireless charging is inefficient because pushing electricity through the air means a lot of it gets lost. It’s a very sloppy way of getting electricity from one place to another compared to using a wire. Depending on a lot of factors, it can be an incredible contrast. Put electricity through a copper wire and you could expect it to lose about about 3% per 100 feet, according to a quick internet calculator I found. Put the same amount of electricity through a broadcast antenna and you should expect it to lose about 99.94% of it over the same distance. Yeah, seriously.
Wireless charging takes place over very short distances so it’s not that dire. Still, it’s an inefficient way to get power from point A to point B. How inefficient? We need to dig in a little bit to understand.
Watts on second
Electricity use is measured in kilowatthours. A kilowatthour is equivalent to the amount of energy it takes to run a 1,000 watt appliance for 1 hour. Since volts x amps = watts, it’s equivalent to running a 110 volt appliance that uses 9.1 amps for one hour. Think of it as the amount of energy used in running a microwave oven for 45 minutes and you’d be about right.
According to the internet, charging your phone using a wire uses 15 watthours, or .015 kilowatthours, to go from empty to full. Doing the same thing with a wireless charger uses 21 watthours, or .021 kilowatthours. So what we’re saying is that charging your phone wirelessly uses .006 kilowatthours more. That’s a tiny number.
But hey, with 15 million cell phones, multiply that out and that means you’re wasting 90,000,000 — ninety million — kilowatthours just to have the convenience of charging your phone. We’re going to call that 90,000 megawatthours, because that’s how powerplants are measured. By the way, this is charging once per day, so here’s a bit more math. In a year, you need to produce 32,850,000 megawatthours of electricity just to cover the extra energy used by wirelessly charging. Hey, these are some very large numbers. Should we be worried?
Is this killing the planet?
So that sounds like a lot. But here’s something else that sounds like a lot. One typical power plant can produce 5,000,000 megawatthours of electricity per year. So what we’re saying is, if the whole planet charged their phones wirelessly we would need about 7 more power plants worldwide to cover the gap.
Again, according to some quick internet research, there are 62,000 power plants in the world. Worst case scenario, 7 of them — .01% of them — are engaged in giving us the extra juice it takes to charge wirelessly. When you put it that way, it seems like a lot of chatter for no reason.
All this proves is that any time you talk about anything on a global scale, the numbers sound amazingly huge. Here’s a random example. The average home with 4 occupants has about 20 million dust mites inside it. Yes, I know, ew. Let’s say that equates to 5 million dust mites per person. Multiply that out by 7.9 billion people on the planet and you’re saying that there are about 39,500,000,000,000,000 dust mites on the planet. You might be tempted to think we are drowning in dust mites. But have you ever seen a dust mite? They’re super small and we don’t even know they’re there.
In conclusion…
I’ll admit that a more knowledgeable person can swoop in and utterly destroy my math. All I did is some quick internet research. But even if I’m off by 100% and .02% of the world’s power is used to let us charge wirelessly, I’m not sure it’s really the level of crisis that some folks say it is. I think turning off the air conditioner 10 minutes sooner would more than compensate for this difference, and maybe that makes a bit more sense anyway.
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