A new survey by the Digital Power Group, a tech investment advisory, found that the average iPhone uses more energy in a year than a midsize refrigerator.
The numbers back it up. The iPhone uses about 361 kilowatt hours a year, compared to an Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star rated refrigerator, which uses 322 kilowatt hours a year. The iPhone’s energy stacks up the wireless connections, data usage and battery charging. It also points out that unlike for many of us, the energy usage on our iPhones never stops. It says hardly anyone turns their phone off any more, they just recharge it overnight.
Researcher Brian Walsh added, “As anyone who has ever tried to husband the battery of a dying smart phone knows, transmitting wireless data, whether 3G or wi-fi, adds significantly to power use. As the cloud grows bigger and bigger, and we put more and more of our devises on wireless networks, we’ll need more and more electricity.”
The survey, titled The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power”, states the world’s Information Communication Technology ecosystem, which includes smart phones and server farms, takes up about 10% of the of the world’s energy. And on top of that, our smartphones are requiring even more energy. The paper claims it takes more energy to stream a high definition movie to a smart phone than it does to ship a DVD of the same film.
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