The Blog - The 100th Object
In the space of a decade, the mobile phone has become an item of clothing. When the first models appeared, it was not unknown for status conscious managers to leave the office, hide in the bushes and invent pointless tasks for secretaries to demonstrate their prowesss as road warriors (these tricks fooled nobody). Now the secretary is the CEO and mobiles are a networking tool, the central heating switch and can anyone remember what a camera looked like. There are a lot of mobile phones around, but there has not been an accompanying surge of demand for electricity to fuel them. Mobile phones are good at energy.
As the proud owner of a soldering iron and an R&D business I could throw away my phone charger and charge the battery from an old solar panel. Less fortunate individuals could spend £30 on a reliable solar phone charger (the key word is reliable, I aplogise to my children, the one's I bought you were not reliable). However, other than a desire to play with bits of wire, there is no point, my carbon footprint will still be determined by the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine.
Over the past 100 years, coal and more recently nuclear power stations have provided us with as much electricity as we are prepared to pay for. Until relatively recently, the availability of energy has been more important than price. The historic availability of unlimited energy is making it difficult to deal with climate change and energy security.
In the recent BBC/British Museum series "100 objects that changed the world", number 100 was a solar powerd LED light. Being a minimalist by nature, I would have ommitted the LED light and just called it a small independent supply of electricity. In parts of the world which are not served by an electrical dstribution grid, these systems are creating a different type of energy economy, one that is largely shaped by solid state devices like phones, LED lights, computers etc. with efficient DC-DC conversion to handle different voltage requirements.
Having a limited supply of energy means you have to think smarter and some of that thinking can be delegated to computers. Which brings us back to the mobile phone. A typical mobile phone has a 3.6 volt battery with a capacity between one and three AH, i.e. not very much, yet it does a lot. The success of the mobile phone is it's ability to manage energy. With a virtually unlimited supply of cheap energy, there is little incentive to apply the same discipline to things which spend their life plugged into a wall socket.
Most western energy economies are encouraging the development of renewable energy sources such as offshore wind farms. To the best of my knowledge, all these projects are plugged into the existing distribution grids. An interesting and extremely challenging alternative would be to create a separate renewable energy economy, for example what would a shopping mall whose only source of energy was a local wind farm look like. A student assignment might be "Study your iPhone and use the lessons to design a supermarket".