this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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An ad like this uses about 1920W constantly, your phone uses about 10W when active and in use. Lets say your city has 100k inhabitants and all use their phone right now than thats 1MW or about a 1/5 wind turbine. So you break even with 521 of these adverts. While I can only see how they run ~100 of these ads for a city that size, we can also roughly estimate that people "only" have a screen on time that matches this figure. So yeah, they are roughly using the same amount of energy to display the ads compared to the problem they are trying to solve.
In a sane world they would use all the effort to build a single wind turbine and then shut the fuck up.
While were doing maths I can see the eight florescent tube lights behind the sign art, even trying to overestimate the size of the poster and assuming it has 1.16m wide fluorescent tubes in it that are the brightest available that would be 8 * 36W = 288W.
So I think you're overestimating the power used by the sign by over septuple.
I don't agree with the campaign though, its just more framing consumers (of relatively modest usage) as a big part of the issue when they really are not. If everyone cut their phone use in half it might impact less than a percentage point of CO2. It distracts from the real problems, thereby assisting the big polluters.
I didnt specify it but this was my source: https://adfreecities.org.uk/2019/11/the-electricity-cost-of-digital-adverts/
That might be on the higher end but I guess they dont use the lowest brightness tubes as they need to shine through the poster and also it accounts for the double sided-ness (at least in my area they are always double sided).