Current strength: how mobile communications changed our attitude to energy

(c) The Huffington Post UK

Electricity is a resource we rarely think about. Sockets are in each apartment, in each house, in trains, airplanes. Created billions of gadgets that consume electricity, including mobile phones and smartphones. If the battery is low, and there are no outlets nearby, we worry.

Whether electric hunger from mobile phones is waiting for us and how we will fight with it, we reason under the cut.

How many "eat" the phone

Back in 2013, it was estimated that the share of information technology accounts for 10% of global electricity consumption. According to the Digital Power Group, at least 361 kWh per year is spent on using one smartphone (taking into account wireless connections, data transfer and battery charging). A medium-sized refrigerator consumes only about 322 kWh per year.
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(c) http://mosafernameh.com/ . If the outlet is out of electricity, then a lemon will always come to the rescue. Lemon juice works as an electrolyte for two metal electrodes - nickel and copper. However, to at least start charging the phone, you will need at least 17 lemons.

One user of mobile communications in the world accounts for about 10-17 kWh per year (per one smartphone). And there are still many devices, including charging for the phone, which often remain on the network and continue to consume electricity !

According to the calculations of three years ago , the infrastructure of the mobile communications will involve large data centers that store, transmit and process data (250–350 TWh per year), wired and wireless networks of various types, including cellular (250-600 TWh) ), user equipment (460-1200 TW * h), factories that produce all the electronics used in this infrastructure (560-800 TW * h). Total 1 100-2 800 TW * h (that is, at least 1000 TW * h). And if the level of power consumption by mobile devices has practically not changed over the past three years (although the number of devices has increased), then mobile traffic is growing at an average of 53% per year worldwide. It cannot be said that electricity consumption in the industry is increasing at the same pace, but there is certainly a connection with the growth of energy costs. What is it now and what will be by 2020 is an interesting question for researchers.

What does the future hold?

Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) - Forecast of an increase in global mobile traffic from 2015 to 2020 .

If the growth rate of the number of users does not change, by 2020 there will be 5.4 billion mobile subscribers and more than 10 billion smart devices capable of connecting to mobile networks in the world. For comparison: only 5.3 billion people will have access to electricity, and 3.5 billion - to centralized water supply. By the way, now in Uganda (East Africa) only 3 million people have home coverage, and 10 million have mobile phones. Data source: Cisco .

Energy consumption will increase due to changes in the use of mobile devices. Regular voice communication is becoming a thing of the past, supplanted by various Internet communications. Among all applications, mobile video comes out on top in terms of growth rate. In two years, according to Cisco , the share of 4G connections will exceed 2G, and by 2020 4G will account for the lion's share of all mobile traffic (having exceeded traffic of previous generations of communications six times). For comparison: the share of 4G in Russia last year occupied 16.5% of the mobile communication market.

This forecast does not take into account the fact that by 2020, 5G is expected to become widespread. By comparing the 4G traffic forecast with the 5G capabilities (in which the volume and speed of data transmission will increase many times), we get the numbers at the levels of hundreds of exabytes of mobile traffic data. All this information will circulate in the network of billions of connected - and energy consuming - devices.

For ten years, mobile traffic will grow more than 100 times. Moreover, mobile traffic will grow twice as fast as traffic from fixed IP addresses. And Wi-Fi access points will add dozens more exabytes of data to the general flow.

Base stations

Endpoint devices are just the tip of the iceberg. It is necessary to supply all base stations with the power supply, thanks to which cellular communication works. The amount of electricity consumed depends on many factors, but approximate estimates can be given. Previously, the base station operating according to the 2G standard had a useful consumption of 720 W (18 transmitters of 40 W each), plus the power supply of the cooling fans. Today, the actual power of the process equipment at full load can be 5 kW, and another 1.6 kW falls on the air conditioner of the equipment cabinet.

To charge mobile devices, at first glance, you need a little energy. But if in a week you have one hour of watching videos on a smartphone, then more energy is spent in a year than the work of two refrigerators. It takes into account not only the battery charging, but also the total energy consumption of the cellular and computing infrastructure.

At the same time, it doesn’t matter what phone you use or how much power the 2G / 3G / 4G base station consumes. What matters is what content you consume. The resources of the five-qubit quantum processor created by IBM Research can be used from any mobile device, not to mention the usual cloud computing services. The entire huge mobile access infrastructure requires giant data centers around the world, each year consuming more and more power.

Electricity as currency

How electricity becomes a valuable resource for operators and other companies is clearly illustrated by the story that happened in Kenya.

M-Pesa is a mobile money service (allows you to transfer money to your phone and make purchases with it) was launched by the Kenyan operator Safaricom, which in turn is a daughter of Vodafone. In Kenya, M-Pesa has more than 15 million subscribers and virtually no competitors. On the basis of M-Pesa, the M-Kopa service quickly developed, allowing you to buy solar panels in installments. A very up-to-date service where mobile communication is developing, but at the same time, the situation with ordinary wired electricity is extremely bad. The whole essence of the problem can be conveyed by one news headline: "The monkey has become the reason for the large-scale outage in Kenya." The best solution in these conditions is the solar battery, from which you can not only power the phone, but also return the “wallet with money”. However, a SIM card that is placed inside the solar panels may, at the request of the operator, remotely disconnect electricity to the subscriber if he has delayed the payment. That is, you can stay in the desert without electricity, money and communication, if you don’t put money into the account in time.

Results: (so far) without energy hunger

The need to charge the phone only stirs interest in alternative energy sources in regions where it is difficult to gain access to electricity at the outlet. With regard to energy consumption in developed countries, there is a new trend: the use of technologies that allow you to share data with minimal energy consumption. For example, engineers from the University of Washington demonstrated the Passive Wi-Fi system, which allows you to share data, spending 10,000 times less energy on it.