And it seems we're not alone. Thanks to
Slashdot we've received over 2,000 new votes on
I Want My Green Plug in under 24 hours, and hundreds of new supportive
comments. Some excellent points have been raised in the Slashdot comments, and we hope to address many of them, here, since due to a technical glitch we were unable to post on Slashdot.
On USB As a Universal Standard
USB is indeed a universal standard. It does not require voltage negotiation, since the voltage level is fixed at 5V. By default,
Green Plug-enabled power hubs provide power to USB-powered devices. Green Plug also enables any load (electronic product) to safely accept power from any power source.
E-Waste Can Be Drastically Reduced
Why is it that each electronic product must include a device-specific power adapter, resulting in billions of them being discarded as e-waste? It's because they all require unique voltages and have different maximum current levels. Ideally, homes and offices would have multi-port power hubs that dynamically adjust to the needs of electronic products connected to them. This would eliminate the need for product vendors to have to produce disposable, device-specific power adapters for each product shipped.
Green Plug's Method
There are several power adapters today that configure output voltage to the exact voltage needed by connected devices. Green Plug's method is unique in that the power negotiation is based upon digital communication. Not only can initial voltages be matched to connected devices, but smart power hubs can dynamically react to changing conditions. New monitoring and control applications are possible when there's two way communication between powered devices and their power sources. Green Plug's interactive communication model enables standby power shutoff and dynamic reconfiguration of output power based upon changing state of powered devices.
Greentalk: Will It Become a Standard?
Someday, Green Plug's Greentalk
protocol may become a standard. A non-profit industry consortium, the
Alliance for Universal Power Supplies has been set up to bring manufacturers and other stakeholders together to drive, develop and promote standards for the power supply and electronics products industry. Green Plug has only just begun working with major CE device manufacturers that all recognize that the existing one-to-one power model is broken. It costs manufacturers a lot of money to include power adapters in their products; consumers hate them (who doesn't have a drawer full?); and they are normally thrown away when they are in perfect working order. That's not sustainable and there is a better way.
Our Progress
Green Plug is making terrific progress in its discussions with the most popular vendors. Decisions that affect hundreds of millions or billions of product units are not made quickly. Our first customer demonstrated an award-winning power adapter at CES, where we showcased several concept systems at CES that showed
interoperable power. We've also begun working with
influential organizations that see the potential for the new open systems power model.
Licensing Process
Greentalk is licensed free of charge to qualified manufacturers of load devices (electronic products that consume power.) On the load device, Greentalk can run in an existing processor and in some cases can be implemented for no added cost. Even in devices that require hardware modifications to run Greentalk, the cost of implementing it in the load is a tiny fraction of the cost of an external power adapter. Even legacy devices can get power from a Green Plug-enabled power hub through a smart cable. If we could get beyond the chicken-and-egg scenario and imagine that smart power hubs are ubiquitous, product vendors could eliminate the cost of building, packaging and shipping external power adapters with their products. Everyone wins.
What's Ahead
You can expect to see some announcements this year of major electronic product vendors incorporating the free Greentalk protocol into their products. We hope you will continue to support our mission by voting to encourage more manufacturers to
adopt this technology.
As always, we thank you for your ongoing support.
