Energy usage of mobile telephone services in Germany

Calling for change? Innovation, diffusion, and the energy impacts of global mobile telephony

“…This extends earlier attempts to estimate the energy consumption of mobile phone use (Paiano, Lagioia, & Cataldo, 2013;Sadordsky, 2012;Schaefer, Weber, & Voss, 2003), including in lifecycle assessments (Malmodin et al, 2010;Yu, Williams, & Ju, 2010;Scharnhorst, Hilty, & Jolliet, 2006), almost always performed at a country level. Finally, the systemic analysis of market and power consumption trends provides valuable insights about the impact of mobile communication on energy consumption and, thus, on sustainability.…”

“…Figure 14 shows the observed efficiencies, covering a broad range from more than 90% to less than 30%. The average efficiency of the charging process is around 49.85%, though higher than the 27% found in the experiments with older models reported in Schaefer, Weber, & Voss (2003). Results show that half of the energy power absorbed from the grid is in average lost in the charging process and only the other half is converted into service (call, stand-by, text message or internet connection).…”

“…21 Actually, the energy consumed by letting the charger plugged into the grid even if the phone is unplugged (the socalled no-load) (Horowitz et al, 2004) was found to be near-zero for all the phones surveyed from 2002 to 2011. This is a progress compared to the older chargers tested in Schaefer, Weber, & Voss (2003), which presented a stand-by power (of chargers) of 1.5 W.…”

“…when the battery does not reach its full capacity anymore after a series of uncompleted charging processes (Schaefer, Weber, & Voss, 2003). Also the voltage of the batteries stabilized around 3.6-3.7 V for the handsets released after 2000, while it varied between 2.4, 3.6, 4.8, 6, 7.2, 7.5 V for those from the previous period.…”

“…If the latter is relatively easy to estimate from the product specifications provided by the manufacturers (see section 5.2.1), the data on the time of the calls and other modes is hardly ever available from operators since even aggregated numbers could reveal information regarding customer profiles (Schaefer et al, 2003). This problem has been circumvented in previous studies at the country level (Schaefer, Weber, & Voss, 2003;Paiano, Lagioia, & Cataldo, 2013) by creating different user profiles and assuming (with more or less statistical support) a distribution of subscribers by profile. In addition, it is necessary to estimate the losses of the charging process, which the same studies extrapolate from the results of experimental tests with real models.…”