Let’s start with a couple questions: How often do you leave a charger in the power socket after your device’s battery is fully charged? Or do you perhaps leave it in on purpose for convenience?
After all, one charger doesn’t waste that much energy when idle. Right?
Right.
However, your charger is not alone. When regarding the whole apartment building or your neighborhood, we start to see the true scale of the problem. How many phone chargers are idle on the socket at any given time? What about in your city? In your country? Or even globally?
And the situation changes considerably, when a device is also left plugged in the charging cable (even more when using wireless charging). The charger will constantly force the battery’s charge to 100 %, if there is no mechanism preventing this. This process consumes energy, little by little. And that’s not even all.
Small streams make large rivers
When talking about mobile devices, smartphones are often the first to come to mind. And that is no wonder, as there are currently approx. 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide, and the number is constantly growing. However, smartphones alone make only a small portion of the total number of mobile devices. Even when we consider only tablets and smartphones, the number of mobile devices was 14.02 billion in 2020 and this is expected to increase to 17.72 billion in 2024.
When we take the vast range of battery-based technology into account, the amount of idle charging will become more apparent. Laptops, handheld consoles, wireless headphones, e-bike batteries, and even cordless vacuum cleaners are often left plugged in the wall or in their charging docks so that they’ll be fully charged and ready at all times. For example, many workplaces and institutions like universities have charging docks for the shared laptops and tablets, so that users may pick one whenever they need it.
Now, we can only imagine the true magnitude of this constant stream of electric current, and how much it costs us and our environment.
EU and international community for energy-friendly solutions
After the Paris agreement in 2015 and the IPCC’s special report on global warming in 2018, the urgency of efficient climate actions has become more and more evident. Nations and international unions have made increasingly ambitious climate strategies.
For example, the EU’s 2030 climate and energy framework sets the target of improving energy efficiency by at least 32.5 %. For this, the European Green Deal and the Ecodesign directive are the key toolkits for achieving those targets. From these, especially the Ecodesign directive lays requirements for technological solutions and appliances. It includes requirements and regulations towards standby and off mode of electronic equipment, external power supplies, and no-load condition electric power consumption and average active efficiency of external power supplies.
As such it is clear that these regulations and the pressure for creating new and energy-friendly innovations is directed on the private sector. This is the time for businesses to shine and gain a foothold on the electronic market of the future.
Bright solutions, bright charging, brighter future
Now, how much more convenient would it be, if the current was cut off automatically so that no charger would be idle?
Manufacturers, such as Apple, have created solutions for optimizing battery charging. However, these on-device solutions do not fix the problem as optimizing a small portion of all the battery-based smart technology on the market is only a drop in the ocean. The solution should be applicable for a vast range of devices, including the dummy ones.
BrightCharger is the solution. The BrightCharger innovation cuts off the power as the battery reaches its optimum charge. It is a unique solution that is easy to apply either directly to the power socket or by using an adapter, and is a simple step for fulfilling the requirements and achieving the targets above. For example, if 400 million laptops were charged using BrightCharger technology for one year, the estimated energy savings can reach as much as 2.3 Terawatt hours (TWh) in total.
With BrightCharger, you do not need to worry, if you happen to leave your devices to charge overnight or like to keep your charger plugged in.
What could be more convenient?