# Power Load of Cell Phones

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/power-load-of-cell-phones/719886>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 12, 2015, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/power-load-of-cell-phones/719886 "2015-05-12T20:51:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2015, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/power-load-of-cell-phones/719886/1 "2015-05-12T20:51:32Z")

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What percentage of the US power consumption is from cell phones? All the data I found was per capita consumption. What I’m wondering is how much we use daily as a country, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the total usage. Also, I wonder what is the load of the phones themselves and what is the load from the support infrastructure like the cell towers and such.

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**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2015, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/power-load-of-cell-phones/719886/2 "2015-05-12T21:32:03Z")

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Well, the power load of the phone itself is negligible.  
Even a gigantic smartphone only consumes a few Watt-hours/day. The iPhone 6 has a 11 Watt-hour battery, so if you ran it dead every day, it would take about as much energy as a 60W lamp burning for 10 minutes to charge it.

The cell tower and switching network infrastructure is much harder to quantify. But, I’d bet it’s about the same order of magnitude - each tower serves thousands of customers, so even if they are consuming 10KW•h/day, that is only a few Watt-hours/day per customer.