Smart Phones Use More Power Than A Mid-Size Refrigerator

From The Week, "Your iPhone uses more energy than a refrigerator: And smartphone energy consumption is only going to increase" By Carmel Lobello:

How much energy does it take to power your smartphone addiction?

The average iPhone uses more energy than a midsize refrigerator, says a new paper by Mark Mills, CEO of Digital Power Group, a tech investment advisory. A midsize refrigerator that qualifies for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star rating uses about 322 kW-h a year, while your iPhone uses about 361 kW-h if you stack up wireless connections, data usage, and battery charging.

The paper, rather ominously titled "The Cloud Begins With Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power," details how the world's Information Communication Technology (ITC) ecosystem — which includes smartphones, those high-powered Bloomberg terminals on trading floors, and server farms that span the size of seven football fields — are taking up a larger and larger slice of the world's energy pie.

The slice right now, according to Mills, is about 10 percent, or 1,500 terawatt hours of energy per year.