A phone battery at 5V and 2500mAh (probably about the average) is approximately 12.5Wh of energy storage. Even if you used the entire battery every day, we’re talking 4kW per year, costing ~60¢ in the US.

Your phone battery could only power a standard 60W incandescent lightbulb for 12 minutes, but powers your phone for hours. That’s amazing!

*in the physics sense

https://web.archive.org/web/20180326040930/http://heatball.d...

Which is why nobody uses incandescent bulbs anymore.

You can get the same amount of light for 1/5 of that power with LEDs, i.e. your phone could power that amount of light for an hour.

Yeah, 'kids these days' just get nichrome wire instead of a good old light bulb. :)

There was an article I read a while back (can't find it at the moment) that involved someone modifying a 'modern' EZ-Bake oven to be powered off a USB-C PD charger. The future we live in!

Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. But they want you to spend $$$ on new stuff, so they make it hard for you to fix. And on laptops, soldered SSDs, soldered RAM, non-swappable batteries. You HAVE to buy a new PC even if you just want a little more hard disk space.

But those customers have a worthless opinion.

And starting with the 12, Apple now requires authorized repair shops to use heat to open the phone, something that was previously only done for iPads and was prone to causing repair problems for the casual tinkerer.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/22/iphone-12-heated-displa...

They haven't gone out of their way to make replacing batteries difficult, but it is more difficult than it used to be before phones were waterproof and tightly packaged.

Sure, it requires special tools, but isn't a battery change on a quartz watch pretty easy? I think the going price for a battery change is like 10€. There can't be that much hard work involved with pricing like that.

My watch (Timex) does not require special tools in order to replace the battery, and it's waterproof, small, and lightweight.

I unscrew four small screws on the back using the same screwdriver I've used for years to tighten the screws on my eyeglasses. Pop in the replacement coin cell battery, and screw it back together.

It takes about two minutes and costs about $5.

It can be said about iPhones. I like having a thin, light and watertight phone. If the cost of that is limited avenues for servicing, that’s a tradeoff I am fine with.

For Samsung it’s a much bigger impact. They have a wider temperature operating range and advertise heavily to police, construction and similar outdoor roles. The phones work but chew batteries — replaceable batteries would move more units.

How many times have we had fires with Lenovo laptops, Canon/Nikon/Sony cameras, Dewalt/Ryobi/Makita power tools, and the million other devices that have replaceable Lithium batteries?

As long as users are using OEM batteries, there isn't any greater risk of battery fires, and as long as you price the OEM batteries reasonably, users will use them.

In fact I'd claim that it's safer to have a removeable battery, because if it starts bulging, you can eject it, and dispose of it safely, and replace it, instead of fussing around with first getting your precious files off the soldered SSD while it charges a dangerous bulging battery before you finally send the laptop in for $$$ service.

And add to that every other manufacturer that thinks they have to copy what Apple does (looking at you Samsung), and also removes ability to swap batteries and other things we used to be able to do every easily.

Most people never had more than one battery and there was a lot of wasted space to make that removable door and compartment. Making all of that water resistance, like newer phones are, would be a lot more difficult.

When phones (and laptops) got rid of swappable batteries you could still take off two screws, maybe remove a small amount of adhesive (putty or tape) and unhook the connector to swap it with a fresh one. It's about as user-swappable as RAM is on most workstations.

My phone is fine, but the battery is slowly becoming too weak for my needs. I don't want a new phone, just a new battery.

With the iPhone 4 it was literally removing 3 (sadly proprietary) screws and something like a guitar pick to safely pry it out. Those replacement batteries sell for $11. With newer iPhones, because of waterproofing there are more sealing adhesives and to make room for the stretch-tape you might have to pop off a few components.

When I'm seriously on-the-move, and the phone is critical to the mission, and I'm not able to be attached to a cord or carry a bulky external battery bank - a few thin, flat lithium batteries are an ideal solution. I'm talking about situations where high availability is key. Sometimes I bring 2 or 3 backup phones just in case, all the same model, and they all take the same batteries. It wasn't uncommon for me to have about 8 spare batteries on some trips. Half the batteries were always charging at a base station, and I would swap those out in a few seconds and get back out where I needed to be. Yeah it's not everyone's situation, but now I just need to have 4 or 5 devices instead, and have to use a stupid external charger which never does what I need it to. Operationally it's made me suffer having to use modern devices without removable batteries.

Charging from an external battery bank is just not ideal, it's inefficient, and bulky, and increases the heat of the device while charging which can actually be a problem in some situations.

Changing batteries takes less than a minute, creates no additional heat, and restores the device to 100% instantly.

I did this with every phone I had before they took the option away from flagship phones.

Yes, this is the main issue. But phone manufacturers didn't care that's how batteries are supposed to be used, most likely because it would have sold less phones.

It's weird how tempting it is. I had a roommate that used our clothes dryer daily. I have to admit I felt a little bit of ecosuperiority over him as I hung my clothes. Perhaps briefly pondering how much better the world would be if everyone gave up a luxury I personally could do without (while retaining all of my preferred luxuries for myself, of course).

It's even funny just to think of all the apparatuses involved in me leaving this snooty comment on the internet, a pleasure you'll have to pry from my corpse!

I agree that we're quick to look at other people's small wastes with condescension, but bitcoin is not a small waste.

If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.

Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price.

Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.

I don't really understand economics of fee rewards and whether they'll grow over time linearly or exponentially. I checked historical data and it does not seem to grow at all. So I'll suppose that reward fee will not grow.

So in the end you'll have block reward of 10-20 BTC. That's all you have to pay your electricity bills after you mined block. So basically energy spent per block is directly correlated to bitcoin price, and that's about it.

Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

So while bitcoin network might draw non-negligible amount of electricity, it still is limited by design.

Now if miners will decide to change bitcoin design, for example to increase block size, that's another matter. But it's not clear if that would happen.

Mining bitcoin is essentially printing money, so miners with profitable setups have an incentive to expand these setups. As mining capacity grows, a parameter called "difficulty" - which represents how much power you need to waste to mine a block - is adjusted so that the mining rate remains constant. Since mining is necessary to maintain network security, difficulty will grow to compensate for expanding mining capacity, but not high enough to kill it off.

If you look at the history of the adjustments to difficulty, you'll find a pretty much clean exponential.

(In other words, Bitcoin is as close as we've ever come to expressing greed in units of kilowatt hours.)

Since supply will become more and more constrained over time, while demand has no realizable upper limit (that we know of), this assumption is wrong:

> Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

If bitcoin were to be fully adopted by the mainstream, BTCs would be easily in the M$ range.

So that's a rough estimate upper bound if Bitcoin would become our civilization currency of choice: 1.2% of total energy spent.

Not the end of the world, if you ask me.

Incorrect, growth curve is driven by mining power and forces innovation in lower cost of electricity. The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.

You seem to be missing a couple units there...

I see this take quite regularly and it seems a normal response to clickbaity headlines like "BTC has same power usage as Switzerland", but I think it misses some important nuance to the debate.

* Most studies locate miners and then assume their CO2 output based on energy use assuming a general energy mix of the country, this is not useful because energy usage != CO2 output, it depends very much what energy source is used * Miners are strongly incentivized to find the cheapest possible electricity, often means finding pockets of excess wasted energy, which is also often renewable or hydro and using it rather than letting it go to waste * BTC can be thought of as converting frequently excess wasted units of energy into a commodity which can be sold * The above might change and if for some reason coal became the most competitively priced energy source then this would be very bad for the environment indeed.

Whether or not BTC is useful, it undeniably holds value, in the literal sense that if I gave you 1 now you could sell it at a market rate

All the above notwithstanding, a lot of research is going into finding an alternative to Proof-of-Work that is less energy intensive and I would hope that in the future a secure alternative will be found.

Love the bitcoin submarine. lol.

To add something informative to the conversation ...

The reason that the big bitcoin farmers are located in China is that the power generation model is different in China than the West.

China is controlled by about 8 Dragon Families in concert with the CCP (you'll notice that in news stories the prominent actors all descended from Maoist leaders, etc.)

So if you're a bitcoin miner, you just talk to the Dragon Family in charge of power generation (for example, one family owns the Three Gorges Dam profit stream, plus most other dams), and hook up to a hydroelectric dam. No published electricity rates for you.

The above also explains why the arrest of the Huawei CFO in Canada is such a big deal in China - she is royalty, and the West is treating her like a common peasant.

She only thinks she's somebody.

No one knows who the fuck she is outside of China.

Sweating just not good enough for me, even when it's dry. I can cope with it, it's not like being hot would kill me (within reason and if I stay hydrated), but it has a serious impact on my performance. When it's hot my brain gets foggy and my thoughts slow. Maybe I could still operate at a caveman level of performance in that sort of weather, but I couldn't do my job.

See also: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Your assumption falls flat because a lot of people don't need to generate extra heat from electricity, they already have too much of it.

Secondly, municipal heat is pretty rare in the US; few cities have it and the number keeps getting smaller each year. What few municipal heat systems that do exist are largely for business districts too, unless if you live in NYC as an American you most likely will be using either AC or forced air natural gas heat. Given the choice between the two[0], AC would be the best possible one from an efficiency perspective.

0: Heat pumps can be used to heat too, which is even better. Its my hope that heat pumps will become more common in the coming decades to assist in electrification.

I'm assuming by "municipal heat" you mean district heating. Can you explain why those systems keep getting rarer in the US? Over here in Europe, we are investing a significant amount of money in expanding those systems and connecting more houses.

And district heating basically doesn’t exist in the US outside of NYC.

A quick search indicates there are 3.5 billion smart phones in the world, assuming these are all wirelessly charged and wasting 1kWh per year that gets you 3.5TWh which is more than the annual consumption of many countries

I had a similar discussion with a friend recently about all the cars driving around with lights on in the middle of the day - even if they might be using LEDs, when you multiply by the number of cars on the roads that is still a lot of petrol being wasted for no reason at all

If you think running some LEDs are expensive, you don't want to know what a serious accident costs society. The type that totals two cars and puts multiple people in hospital.

I have a car that pre-dates DRLs, and I always drive it with the lights on. The "horrendously" inefficient incandescent bulbs might cost me an extra dollar or two in fuel, but could save my life. I'd rather have my life.

For anyone else thinking like I was, this is the evidence from the UK government site [1]:

Research has shown that DRLs are likely to reduce multiple vehicle daytime accidents and fatalities by up to 6% once all vehicles are equipped. DRL are likely to result in a small increase in fuel consumption and CO² emissions of around 0.5% but this is expected to be lower when LEDs are used in place of filament light sources.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/daytime-running-l...

Doesn't apply to wireless phone charging though, so I'm standing by that comment until someone disabuses me of that too..

Yes, countries like Liechtenstein, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Even a generous upper bound estimate like 3.5TWh is vanishingly small in the face of our ~21PWh annual global energy consumption. [0]

The point is: by focusing on wireless charging, we'd be investing effort in ineffective endeavors while there's far more low hanging fruit we could pick. And people's willingness to put in effort for the environment is a finite resource as well. So we should be smart about spending it.

For example: instead of worrying about daytime lights, how about cycling instead of driving, even just once in a while, whenever the weather is nice and you're feeling like it? That's sure to have a greater impact on the environment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

We did some quick mental math and figured that charging his phone from empty to full would take about as much energy as driving the car a few inches. He plugged the phone in.

It's not just Apple that is turning something that would be durable into a consumable for profit. At work for decades Dell notebook power-supplies would fail in the exact same manner, cable fraying at the hard edge with the connector plug. It was such a predictable issue Dell at one point even offered a power supply renewal option together with their battery replacement subscription.

Maybe the difference isn’t so low as you estimate it? Maybe the wired chargers use much less power when the phone is not being charged, compared to the wireless chargers? Then the difference could be approximately 0 (as your phone is charged only a few hours per day) to approximately N kWh (due to a constant power draw — nobody will buy a wireless charger to keep it unplugged).

Otherwise, I agree that not upgrading the phone saves even more.

And honestly I’m tired to be asked to change lot of little things in my life when all of them cumulated won’t even account for the pollution generated by a random factory in a day.

If they really cared about the environment, they'd avoid updating their product every year and encourage users to keep using the same device for longer, but of course they would never do that.

I mean, look at iOS 14 -- it supports phones that are five years old. There is no prompting to upgrade to a new device. There is advertising on billboards and on TV, but not on the phone itself.

What Apple needs however is to make swapping Battery cheaper, and invest in battery technology that makes them last longer in cycles. Right now the battery replacement is $ 69 for iPhone 12. While the iPhone 8 and below are much more reasonable $49.