As much as we love Smartphones, they are a pretty inefficient technology. We typically focus on charging as the main point of energy consumption, but new research from MIT suggests the real inefficiencies happen far from your outlet. Cellular base stations, the facilities where electricity is turned into radio signals, suck up an astounding $36 billion worth of electrical energy a year. You may think that all that juice helps to make your phone blazing fast, but it doesn’t. According to researchers at MIT much of this is wasted by a single inefficient piece of hardware – and they may have finally cracked the problem with a new design.
via Inhabitat
November 2, 2012
