A technology that could help the environment by eliminating the need to ship a power adapter with every electronics device got a vote of confidence Friday from consumer electronics maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics.
Westinghouse said it had committed to using a smart power technology developed by a start-up company, Green Plug, that aims to let people use a single "universal adapter" to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics gear.
Most products today ship with a custom adapter that converts AC power from a wall socket into the correct DC power required for each device. Green Plug's technology allows each device to communicate its individual power requirements to the power adapter, allowing several devices to share one adapter.
The technology's success depends partly on getting support from electronics manufacturers, who will need to embed Green Plug's firmware into their devices so that they can send their power requirements to the adapter. That's why Westinghouse's support is significant.
"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are the first, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO of Westinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors and digital photo frames.
Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology will also help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually it could stop shipping power adapters with its products because customers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.
Each adapter will act like a hub that several devices can plug into. The first are expected to go on sale in the first quarter next year for under US$100, Chang said. The adapters also will shut off the power supply when a device has finished charging or is turned off, giving further energy savings.
It remains to be seen whether other electronics vendors will follow suit. Green Plug also needs semiconductor makers to build its technology into chips that will go into the universal adapters. Green Plug CEO Frank Paniagua said his company already has one chip-maker on board, though he won't say yet who it is.
Westinghouse made its announcement at the second meeting of the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies, a group comprising electronics vendors, power supply makers, utility companies and others promoting standard power systems to reduce e-waste and inefficiency. The meeting in San Francisco was attended by representatives from Fujitsu, Motorola, Intel and Broadcom, among others.
The stakes for the environment are high. More than 3 billion power adapters will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 2.2 billion just three years ago, according to Greg Lefebre of the environmental consultancy ESS. The growth has been driven by the proliferation of devices like cell phones, MP3 players and digital cameras.
A whopping 434 million consumer electronics devices are "retired" in the U.S. each year, Lefebre said, including 130 million cell phones. In many cases those products, along with their chargers and power adapters, end up in landfills, he said.
Some vendors don't have an incentive to eliminate unique power supplies and connector cables, because they get supplementary revenue stream from selling replacements, Lefebre noted. He cited Apple, which uses a proprietary connector for the iPod, as a prime example.
There are other hurdles too. Code Cubitt of Motorola Ventures, speaking on a panel here, said product managers are fixated on providing a good "out of the box" experience. If the company ships a product without an adapter, and the consumer doesn't have a universal adapter at home, it creates a bad impression of the company.
Comments
not bad actually its something promising, way to go!
This will only work on a Thursday in September one day...
The Chinese have the right idea on this one. Just make everything run on 5V via a USB connector. Vendors can ship custom 'AC - to - USB' adaptors for a while, and after that, viola, we all have universal power adaptors.
I had a Compaq (HP-Q) notebook that had 2 adapters die on it after the warranty expired. Each cost roughly $80 from the HP-Q authorized dealers.
Apple has a proprietary power connector on the Mac Mini too - it isn't the standard desktop PC power connector. Check it out at:
http://www.apple.com/macmini/
Scroll down to the last picture on the page and you'll see it right there!
The power switch is on the back too, so I wonder if they're trying to keep consumers from shutting down their Macs.
Wall-warts draw very little current when not powering a device. Most devices are designed with a standby mode that draws little or no power from the wall-wart when charged and not in use. This universal power supply must draw a similar amount of current when not powering a device, in order to power it's circuitry that detects devices being attached. To realize any power savings (or for that matter, any benefit to using this scheme), multiple wall-warts must be replaced by one universal power supply, and even then the power savings don't amount to much. The only significant impact I can see would be related to disposal issues. Fewer (but bulkier) power supplies manufactured, which don't become obsolete when the device they power dies, could result in a significant net decline in waste that ends up in landfills.
It will take wide-scale adoption by device manufacturers, and some amount of time for these power suplies to be ubiquitous enough for the demand for new ones to go down, kicking in the positive effects of the plan. It could happen, though. USB enjoys wide-scale adoption, and this scheme is kind of like an extended USB power bus.
I think the best way to deal with the issues addressed by this design, is to continue to move toward using USB (ubiquitous now, and the move is already under-way) to power and charge the vast majority of devices for which USB power is sufficient, and move to the universal supply for the bigger stuff like laptops and power tool batteries. Nobody's going to buy a $49 mp3 player that requires a $99 charger they don't already have. It won't be practical to design the smaller stuff to use these supplies until they are already in wide-spread use.
Way to go!
This is even better than my rants I have been making for years, that we need universal power supplies for phones. Manufacturers of these devices I suggest could be held in violation of ISO/IEC 14001 the international standard for environmental controls.
Requiring the consumer to purchase different power supplies for, in some cases, newer models of cell phones from the same manufacturer! is an obvious disregard to the environment designed only to provide selfish profits to the manufacturer.
I love technology and do not want to go back to the old days. I don't even like to drive without my GPS anymore. But we need as a society to manage technology in a much more efficient way. This is a great step in that direction.
Bravo!
This is awesome. Only one adapter to handle everything. I can stop lugging around four different adapters in my suitcase to power my phone, PDA, shaver, and electric toothbrush. They can put them in cars and airplanes and then I won't need to bring any adapters at all.
I've thought this would be a great idea for over a decade. At a minimum laptop vendors could agree on an adapter, cell phone vendors could agree, etc., but an all-in-one is great.
I don't see not shipping the power adapter any different than all the printer companies not shipping a USB cable during the parallel to USB transition. Everyone will adapt - at first you'll have labels saying you need to purchase a universal power adapter - and once you have one you won't need to buy it again, and overall customers will be happier, and we won't have all these devices no one has power adapters for, or worse, power adapters that you have no idea what it goes to (how annoying is that?).
anonymous says "Wall-warts draw very little current when not powering a device.": too bad that is not true. Most wall warts (or 'wall vampires' as I prefer to call them) still draw quite a few Watts when nothing is connected, some are better and most are much worse (they are wasting energy through the transformer and bridge rectifier and filtering capacitor). This new method shuts down to nothing (or maybe 1 or 2 micro-W) when not being used, plus its scheme is more efficient when running (at least based on everything I have seen).
Saying everything should be USB and 5V has some problems: USB limits the max current, and devices are not supposed to draw it unless they have asked 1st; further, unpowered USB hubs split the same current among all devices and so may fail to provide enough even then; few people want to wait 2 or 3 times as long to charge some device because of current limiting. Finally, if you use USB to power, that means you are leaving a PC powered to do this, and that is a huge waste of power. Even if you have a powered USB hub, its transformer will draw power all the time, whether anything connected or not (and most of the time it will be not).
The biggest problem is the chicken and egg issue of how people get these in their houses 1st. But, perhaps rebates such as you get for CFLs and other such techniques can speed this up.
By the way, this meeting was for the newly formed org: AUPS (Alliance for Universal Power Supplies).
As much as I hate legislation, that may be what this takes. It's one of those deals that it doesn't really matter how it's done as long as everyone does it the same way.
While this approach has merit, it sounds a little complicated. I think a big dent could be made in this if everyone just used the same plug for the same supply.
Something like:
5V low power
5V high power
12V low power
12V high power
And maybe a couple of odd balls:
15V high power
18V high power
Jim, the model of the universal supply is not complicated. The end points also do not have to be complicated either, since minimally they only have to say what voltage they need and when they do not need it anymore (done charging for example). The model has to allow more complexity for those who want to do smart charging (change current over time as battery gets fuller) or use adapting (e.g. higher voltage when active and low voltage when not). The more universal it is, the cheaper the components become (economy of scale).
Note that the plug situation is the real hard nut. Many vendors want to keep their existing plugs and many have the same physical form factor, but differing voltage or even polarity (!). But, this is not just about voltage. If you look at a transformer, you will see that some are very low current (e.g. 100mA) and some are high (e.g. 4A). A high current one costs more and often will not work with a low current load (they kick in only when the load is high enough). Further, some produce really ugly looking DC and some are perfect no matter the load. This is why a universal supply can make all the difference - it is a single fixed cost borne once and lasting years. If gadgets switch to this, then you only need one per work area to power/charge as many items as you have (from laptops to task lights). If common, desks and cubes will come with these built-in (that was the message from Steelcase) and so it is just easy for everyone. Further, hotels and planes could start including them, so no issue for traveling, etc.
This is a great idea but it would take a long time to get going just because current devices are not compatible so you would need to universalize everything new now and then make this standard in 5 years or so.
Cool beans.
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