Nokia has just introduced a new feature that supposedly will save enough energy to power 85,000 homes a year. Nokia’s entire product line as well as all future models will now alert owners encouraging them to unplug the charger after the phone’s battery is fully charged.
According to the press release:
Kirsi Sormunen, Vice-President of Environmental Affairs at Nokia said, “Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket. We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers.”
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Nice feature! I’m at an advanced batteries conference in Long Beach right now, and a consistent theme that emerges is the energy loss in lithium-ion batteries when they’re fully charged but unused.
This doesn’t matter much for mobile phone users who get calls every day, but it does for laptops — and likely electric-drive cars — since battery life is way reduced if you continuously top it up.
By comparison, HEVs like the Prius keep their batteries between 40% and 65% of charge for maximum life (and minimum warranty claims on very expensive NiMH battery packs).
I’ve always wanted a little utility that overrides the power-control software on my laptop, so it’ll cut out the charger at 80% charge for better battery life (unless I tell it I’m going on a plane trip that day).
This Nokia announcement is encouraging, and I bet we see more like this. BUT … will consumers actually DO it?
May 18th, 2007 at 9:38 am