Perhaps there was confusion over my original statement, as it was short. I’ll attempt to clarify. There is no intent on my part to move the goal posts in any way.
It seems as if you were interpreting my first statement to say that 25% of the total energy from the fuel going in to the car was going in to the phone. I agree, that would be a really silly statement, and it’s not what I intended at all. I can also see how you get there, and how I missed that in your first response, so we talked past each other.
All the energy used to charge any device in a conventional car goes through the engine, converted from fuel at about 25% efficiency. This means it’s impossible to charge a device in your car at better than 25% efficiency, no matter what you do. That’s what I was trying to say the first time around.
That makes a lot more sense then. Yes, I think we can all agree that ICE is an inefficient means of converting gasoline to energy. (But great at converting gasoline to heat.)
Why does everything that has anything to do with charging your phone have to be so unsimple.
I’d really like to see just a simple set of brass contacts on the bottom of phone that would mate to a pair of little brass springs (or really just a matching pair of contacts) inside of a holder that stands your phone upright. No special circuitry, no complicated tiny little plugs (I’m looking at you, USB-c), no heat generation by mismatched positional alignment of charging fields, none of that. Just simple drop in and charge. Could even be molded into the charger for simplicity.
Partly, it looks like they assumed small power plants:
There was also some playing out of worst-case scenarios where not only does everyone use wireless charging, but they uniformly get the worst efficiency.
The lighter socket usually has a 15A fuse, giving about 180W of power. Surprisingly high, enough to charge my laptop. But phone chargers dont draw more than 1A (typically) at 5V.
I understand the sentiment, but this is as dumb as worrying about plastic drinking straws when driving a 500 horsepower truck to McDonalds. It gives people the false impression they’ve actually accomplished something. In that sense, it’s worse than doing nothing at all.
Cut your air conditioning use by one hour a day, then we can talk about the small stuff.
The most compelling use case for inductive wireless charging is for devices that are so small and hence such low power consumers overall that a 40% efficiency bump isn’t a major concern. Those devices are too little or too thin to support a plug. In these cases having what amounts to the secondary of an air-core transformer on the device side is a reasonable approach, I’m not convinced that charging phones is really in that category though - and the rate-limited nature of this type of charging isn’t super attractive for large batteries either. It makes more sense for ear buds and watches and stuff.There are some interesting aspects to the protocols - one of the main standards, (Qi), uses in-band signalling to negotiate power levels with the host and monitor the integrity of the link - basically it periodically checks that the amount of power being delivered is being absorbed in the intended recipient and not randomly heating up your keys or pocket change.
So, you’re saying this energy casually being wasted is “only” the equivalent of 70 billion watt-hours, every 1-2 days. Fine.
It’s that, again, any technological innovation should be aimed at saving energy not wasting it. We’re already well on course for ecological disaster because we are doing nothing– except, finding new ways to make the problem even worse.
Before USB, this was not an uncommon scheme for charging devices (along with barrel plugs). The problem is that to align the contacts properly with the springs you need a cradle which holds the phone in a precise position, which means that cradle only works with one model of phone. You can’t borrow a friend’s charger if they have a different model. It has to be replaced if you ever get a new phone of a slightly different size or shape. It’s large and bulky, so hard to carry a charger with you. You probably want several (home, office, travel?) and each of those is a big plastic cradle which gets thrown out when you replace the phone.
Sure, the current solutions are not perfect, but there are really only two or three types of charging cable out there (Lightning and USB-C, with USB micro-B on its way out). There are rumors that manufacturers are considering no longer including bricks and cables with new phones - which may sound like a bad thing, but when everyone already has compatible chargers everywhere, shipping unneeded new bricks and cables is just waste.
Still using my 5s. It’s got a headphone jack. It doesn’t have a wireless charge option. It’s great. No wasted power, no constant charging of earbuds with impossible-to-replace batteries that’ll eventually quit holding a charge, no throwing it in the landfill when I replace it with a new phone that may have some new capabilities, but experience tells me will continue to be used for exactly the same things I was using my Handspring and a celphone for back in the early 2000s: maps, notes, the occasional stupid little game, reading books, and ignoring all communication attempts that aren’t in the form of text.
Yeah, “only”. Don’t be lazy, ballpark it yourself before you try to throw shade at me.
Global energy usage according to Wikipedia was about 310 trillion Watt-hours daily in 2017, so the absolute worst reasonable case of 70 billion Watt-hours daily means adding another 0.02% to that. Are you trying to tell me an extra 0.02% energy used globally qualifies as an “ecological disaster”?
A little wasted electricity isn’t even a problem if we are moving our grid to renewables, so before anyone convinces me that this is an “ecological disaster waiting to happen” they’re going to have to convince me of a whole bunch of other things, like that the transition to wasteful chargers is happening faster than the transition of the grid to renewable electricity, or that the ecological impact of the increased electricity use is worse than the impact of all the cables we buy for wired chargers instead. I think a more accurate description would be “potential minor ecological setback”.
Moving cars from gasoline to electricity, so they can possibly be powered by renewables, seems far, far more important to me than worrying about wireless charging of phones and other small devices. Improving efficiency of air conditioners or electric stoves, encouraging installation of heat pumps over baseboard electric heat, etc. etc. – if wireless chargers are a potential ecological disaster, these are all real ongoing ecological disasters we should be focusing a lot more attention on.
Yes, I think we can all agree that ICE is an inefficient means of converting gasoline to energy. (But great at converting gasoline to heat.)
