How green is your charger? The answer's in the stars

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 20 November 2008 16:10

Business IT - Technology

Five of the leading mobile handset vendors have joined forces to introduce a common rating system to indicate the efficiency of their mobile phone chargers.

The new rating system indicates how much energy each charger uses when plugged into the wall socket but not actually charging a phone. It will be applied to all chargers currently sold by the five companies, with five stars for the most efficient chargers down to zero stars for those consuming the most energy.

A five star charger must consume no more than 0.03 watts on standby and a one star charger between 0.35 and 0.5watts.

The five vendors - LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson - say that, If the more than three billion people owning mobile devices today switched to a four or five star charger, this could save the same amount of energy each year as produced by two medium sized power plants (whatever a 'medium-sized power plant is).

The group of manufacturers was initially created as part of a European Commission Integrated Product Policy pilot project looking at how different industries could reduce the environmental impact of their products and inform consumers of better choices. Nokia proposed the mobile phone sector to the Commission and was joined by a number of manufacturers, operators and others in the industry.

People will be able to visit the websites of each manufacturer to view and compare the results for every charger. The ratings are based on the European Commission's energy standards for chargers and the internationally recognised Energy Star standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US. They will be reviewed regularly and developed further in order to drive constant improvement.

But why on earth did the cellphone manufacturers have to come up with a 'star rating' when there is already an internationally agreed means of designating the efficiency not just of cellphone chargers but off all such small plug in power packs. It uses the Roman numerals from I to VII with one being the least efficient.

From a December 1 2008 in Australia and April 1 2009 in New Zealand all plug-in power supplies manufactured or sold in these countries and designed to supply a single low DC voltage at up to 250watts will be required to conform to level 'V' efficiency and to be so marked.

The new Australian & New Zealand Minimum Energy Performance Standard (MEPS) requires that power supplies rated at less than 10 watts output should consumer less than 0.5 watts in standby and should be at least 50 percent efficient (ie if they deliver 10 watts to the device they are powering they must draw no more than 20 watts from the mains). At the top end of the scale 250W devices must be at least 84 percent efficient and draw no more than 0.75 watts in standby mode. For devices in between the required efficiency required increases progressively with the rated power output.