OVO

BBC, Universal phone charger approved:

A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body. Industry body the GSMA says that 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers are generated each year. Currently most chargers are product or brand specific, so people tend to change them when they upgrade to a new phone. However, the new energy-efficient chargers can be kept for much longer. The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes.

I remember hearing about the Universal Serial Bus (USB) in the mid 1990s.  There never was a good reason for having so many different kinds of cables to connect electronic equipment, and pending a way to do it wirelessly the USB sounded like a good solution.  Not even twenty years after the introduction of the USB, I count more than ten different kinds of USB cables at the Wikipedia entry.  It’s not quite universal if it’s not… universal.  I’m old enough to remember BETA and VHS tapes in video stores, stores now crowding out the DVDs to fill the shelves with Blue Ray.  And so while I greet the news that phone chargers may have a standardized form soon, I have been misled by such claims before and I’ll believe it when I see it.

Outside of the problems raised by so many different forms of chargers are the problems of so many types of alternating current.  There’s no engineering reason for home users to have different kinds of power based on their nationality, but that’s how things ended up.  Rail gague varies by country so that the enemy’s trains can’t just roll into town.  When was the last time that happened?  I think alternating current varies by location so that each location’s companies / governments can sell us new equipment.  That’s a good capitalist decision, just like my preference in buying less redundant stuff is a good capitalist decision.

Those who know me know that I’ve got a soft spot for R. Buckminster Fuller.   Fuller wrote about the savings that could come if we were to link the world’s energy networks.  The global energy network could save billions of dollars and prevent a great deal of pollution the moment it is turned on.  Leading the charge for this effort is the Global Energy Network Institute.  This proposal requires no new technology that I’m aware of, only the cooperation of governments and corporations.  Fingers crossed…