Radical Redesign Nears for Battery Chargers

Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM
By Chris Calwell, Policy and Research Director, and Suzanne Foster Porter, Senior Research Analyst,

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Energy-efficiency funding is expected to grow rapidly in future years as utilities respond to their internal goals for greenhouse gas reductions and legislation such as AB 32 in California. AB 32 mandates an absolute reduction in total state greenhouse gas emissions of 25% by 2020, at a time when the state's emissions are still rising by roughly 1% per year. An absolute reduction of 70% to 80% in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to stabilize the climate (see “Climate Context” on page 21).^[1]

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has already proposed a series of initial policies for securing those reductions, including mandatory efficiency requirements for external power supplies and many other types of consumer electronics. Hearings on an additional round of energy-efficiency standards are scheduled to get underway in the last half of 2007, addressing battery-charging systems and other energy-consuming products.

The U.S. Department of Energy is also considering mandatory efficiency standards for external power supplies and battery-charging systems. Meanwhile, Europe is evaluating mandatory and voluntary policies to improve power-supply and battery-charger energy efficiency through its Energy-using Products (EuP) effort.^[2]

It is only fitting that the consumer electronics, battery-charger and rechargeable-battery industries be asking: “What are we doing right now to reduce the amount of energy our products consume by at least 70%? What more could we be doing?”

Undertaking such innovation now could mean the difference between having a market-leading technology to sell during the voluntary phase of efficient battery-charger policies, or scrambling to buy or license one from a competitor when regulatory deadlines loom.

After tabulating market research and measured energy consumption results in the laboratory and in homes for hundreds of different electronic products, Ecos Consulting concluded that there are now more than 3.6 billion electronic products in use in the United States consuming more than 300 billion kWh per year. This is about 10% of all national electricity use.

In those products, the largest opportunity to save energy lies in improving the efficiency of ac-dc power conversion. This goal is already the focus of numerous mandatory and voluntary programs worldwide. The next largest energy-saving opportunity is in the battery-charging process, as there are more than 1 billion products that charge batteries.

Studies conducted by Ecos Consulting on actual battery-charger products reveal some of the opportunities for improving the efficiency of these products. The studies make use of a proposed procedure for testing battery-charger efficiency that is expected to become a standard test procedure for agencies such as the CEC when their battery-charger regulations go into effect.

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