How much electricity is wasted by all the cellphones in Kenya?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

02 February 2025

Following up on last week’s article, several readers pointed out that, while they appreciate that energy wasted by leaving one phone plugged in to the charger overnight is insignificantly small, the amount can add up to a large quantity when we consider all the phones in Kenya. Let us try and estimate how much it would be.

Data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) shows that, as of June 2024, there were 66 million cellphone connections in Kenya out of which 36 million were smartphones and the rest were the ordinary type. Now this is interesting given that the population of Kenya is about 56 million: there are now more cellphone lines than people!

Of course, this means that there are a lot of people with more than one line – I being one of them. My two lines are in the same handset. Unfortunately, the number of handsets is not readily available, but we can reasonably assume that the majority of the people have at least two lines. Therefore, we estimate that there are about 33 million cellphone handsets in Kenya.

Further; half of these handsets are smartphones with 5,000mAh batteries while the other half are feature phones with 1,000mAh batteries. So, the average storage capacity is 3,000mAh. With this figure, we can revise last week’s estimated wastage to 60% (3 out of 5); that is, from 0.0004kWh to 0.00024kWh.

Thus, the accumulated wastage by all the 33 million cellphones in the country comes to 7,920kWh per day. In one month, the total comes to 237,600kWh. At face value, this is a lot of energy; it is enough to power about 1,000, three-bedroomed houses for a month.

But there is another way to look at the number: in relation to the national consumption. According to the Kenya Power and Lighting annual audited report, the country consumed about 10.5 billion kWh in the financial year 2023/24. This works down to 833 million kWh per month.

So now we may ask, what proportion of this 833 million kWh is wasted through the habit of leaving phones plugged to the chargers overnight? The answer is 237,600 divided by 833 million; and it comes to 0.03 per cent. Is this something to worry about?

I don’t think so; especially after noticing from the KPLC report that the company bought 13.7 billion kWh and sold 10.5 billion kWh. Over 3 billion kWh was lost in the transmission and distribution system. That is 23 per cent down the drain: we have bigger fish to fry!