Nokia zombie

 A cartoon by Gatis Sluka

Mobile phones

 

Today  in 1973  Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

On October 13, 1983, Ameritech Mobile Communications became the first company to launch a 1G phone network in the US, starting with Chicago. On March 13, 1984, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x of Cooper’s call finally went on sale—for $3,995.

The 8000x wasn’t very mobile—it weighed almost two pounds and took ten hours to charge for thirty minutes of talk time.

(From A Brief History of the Smartphone)

Compare smartphones--a computer in your pocket--with the earliest mobile phone to remind yourself just how rapid technological advance can be.   Then think of how rapidly battery-pack prices have fallen; how EVs have moved from very expensive to price parity; how the cost of lifting a tonne of payload into low earth orbit has fallen 90% and will fall another 90%; how precision fermentation will slash the price of food, while drastically reducing food's environmental impact.

Turning off your smart phones

Source: Bloomberg

A common comment I get from denialists is "if you care so much about global warming, why are you still using a smartphone/laptop"?

OK, so just how much power do smartphones and laptops use?

It takes 1 kWh of electricity to power your smartphone for a year, and 72 kWh to power a laptop for a year (it uses much more because the screen is bigger).  Now, the average US utility customer uses 10,766 kWh per annum.  Let's assume each household has 3 smartphones and 3 laptops.  That means that using these devices consumes 2% of total electricity demand in the US.  OK, but what about making the smartphones and what about the energy used by data centres?

From The Conversation:

Having conducted a meticulous and fairly exhaustive inventory of the contribution of ICT —including devices like PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones and tablets — and infrastructure like data centres and communication networks, we found that the relative contribution of ICT to the total global footprint is expected to grow from about one per cent in 2007 to 3.5 per cent by 2020 and reaching 14 per cent by 2040.

That’s more than half the relative contribution of the entire transportation sector worldwide.

In absolute values, emissions caused by smartphones will jump from 17 to 125 megatons of CO2 equivalent per year (Mt-CO2e/yr) in that time span, or a 730 per cent growth.

The lion’s share of this footprint (85 to 95 per cent) will be caused not by the use of the device, but rather by its production. That includes, in addition to the manufacturing energy, the energy for material mining for gold and the so-called rare-earth elements like yttrium, lanthanium and several others that today are almost exclusively available only from China. 

Another guilty participant in this excessive carbon footprint are the phone plans that encourage users to get a new smartphone every two years. That accelerates the rate at which older models become obsolete and leads to an extraordinary and unnecessary amount of waste.

On the infrastructure side, we predict the combined footprint of data centres and communications networks will grow from 215 megatons of C02 equivalent a year (Mt-CO2e/yr) in 2007 to 764 MtCO2-e/yr by 2020, with data centres accounting for about two thirds of the total contribution.

Sounds bad, doesn't it?   Yet most datacentres are switching to renewable power: Google has switched to 100% renewable energy, as has Apple and Amazon.  Total global CO2 emissions are roughly 40,000 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2, which means manufacturing smartphones will add 125/40,000 or 0.3% of total global CO2 emissions.  If datacentres weren't providing their own green power (and most are) that would add another 764/40000 or 1.9%.  (I'm not sure where the author of the piece in The Conversation gets the 3.5% by 2020 quoted above)

Of course, the people who sarcastically point out that those of us who argue for a greener world are adding to the problem by using smartphones don't in fact really care.  They're just trying to score a point, along the same lines as "Al Gore flies the world a lot, adding to carbon emissions, so he's a hypocrite."

What can you do?  Don't buy a new smartphone every 2 years.  Mine is 4 years old, and my laptop is 5.  They work just fine, and a new battery is now ridiculously cheap.

And, by the way, if you want to do what you can, eat less meat and dairy.  Livestock production contributes 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.  Oh, and don't vote for denialist political parties (Hint: Republicans in the US and the L/NP coalition in Australia.)  The world's steadily rising temperatures will lead to disaster unless we stop emitting carbon dioxide and methane, as soon as we can.

Ultra fast charge and 20 year life

German heritage beech forest

A team at the Technical University in Singapore where the first lithium-ion battery was invented 30 years ago has developed a new lithium-ion battery which will charge fully in minutes and will last 20 years.

Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU) have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes.

The new generation batteries also have a long lifespan of over 20 years, more than 10 times compared to existing lithium-ion batteries.

This breakthrough has a wide-ranging impact on all industries, especially for electric vehicles, where consumers are put off by the long recharge times and its limited battery life.  With this new technology by NTU, drivers of electric vehicles could save tens of thousands on battery replacement costs and can recharge their cars in just a matter of minutes.

Commonly used in mobile phones, tablets, and in electric vehicles, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries usually last about 500 recharge cycles. This is equivalent to two to three years of typical use, with each cycle taking about two hours for the battery to be fully charged.

In the new NTU-developed battery, the traditional graphite used for the anode (negative pole) in lithium-ion batteries is replaced with a new gel material made from titanium dioxide. Titanium dioxide is an abundant, cheap and safe material found in soil. It is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays. Naturally found in spherical shape, the NTU team has found a way to transform the titanium dioxide into tiny nanotubes, which is a thousand times thinner than the diameter of a human hair. This speeds up the chemical reactions taking place in the new battery, allowing for superfast charging. 

Invented by Associate Professor Chen Xiaodong from NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering, the science behind the formation of the new titanium dioxide gel was published in the latest issue of Advanced Materials, a leading international scientific journal in materials science.

The technology is currently being licensed by a company for eventual production. Prof Chen expects that the new generation of fast-charging batteries will hit the market in the next two years. It also has the potential to be a key solution in overcoming longstanding power issues related to electro-mobility.

“Electric cars will be able to increase their range dramatically, with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars,” added Prof Chen.

“Equally important, we can now drastically cut down the toxic waste generated by disposed batteries, since our batteries last ten times longer than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries.”

The 10,000-cycle life of the new battery also mean that drivers of electric vehicles would save on the cost of battery replacements, which could cost over US$5,000 each.

Read more here

It's hard not to believe that Tesla's new gigafactory in Nevada will not be building these batteries given their advantages.  How long before electric cars are the norm?  My guess: 10 years.  Electric cars (EVs) are now where mobile phones were in 1986, just before they took off.