A Battery of Batteries

…on a personal scale

It was the night that I was recharging the batteries in no fewer than four electronic devices that the rapidly increasing use of electricity in our society acquired personal meaning. The electric toothbrush, digital camera, hearing aid and laptop were all glowing or blinking their way to a steady green light. Since that night less than two years ago, I have added cell phone, iPod and electric bike to the rechargeable mix – a veritable Christmas tree of little points of red, orange and green light.

Many of these items belong to the class of information-communication technology, which apparently demands as much energy today as was needed to illuminate the whole planet in 1985. Your iPhone takes as much power as your refrigerator. Streaming a film over wireless equals the energy needed to manufacture and ship a DVD of that movie. I can see why many environmentalists think that gains in efficiency and renewable energy production will be canceled out or overwhelmed by a steep climb in electricity usage.

As an environmentalist I of course ask if we really need all this stuff. Taking my seven rechargeable items as examples, the hearing aid is necessary if I am not to become increasingly isolated and the electric toothbrush is highly recommended by the dental profession. The laptop is portable, gives me hours of enjoyable work on the balcony each summer  and apparently uses less electricity than my old desktop computer. The digital camera is easy to use and it’s such fun and so fast to edit the photos in the computer! The cell phone is now necessary for those of us translating professionally. The iPod will soon acquire a docking station and will be my music center, replacing 120 LPs, a phonograph and a CD player, while the electric bike is both useful and enjoyable and certainly uses less energy and causes less pollution than my car did. All come with very high practicality and/or fun factors and I would not want to be without any of them.

Nonetheless, it is a little scary to realize that all of these things have been acquired in the last ten years and that this story is repeated in households all over the world, with electronic devices gobbling up an ever-increasing percentage of the available electricity. Whereas when I came to Switzerland 45 years ago all the women on the train worked on their knitting and the men read newspapers, nowadays everyone is wired, sending SMSs or listening to music. My older two grandchildren, teenagers, have recently acquired iPhones – the last in their school classes to do so. There are fewer and fewer public phones in Zurich – nearly everyone has a mobile. Looking up a fair price for my car before selling it, I found that I had to pay the small charge for this info by cell phone. 

Surely this marks a more rapid change than that taking place during the previous ten years? What will the next decade bring?

Well, there is an iPhone to replace my cheapy-cheapy cell phone, and a tablet because the laptop is rather heavy to cart about…and …and…