Tel Aviv-based eVolution Networks revealed its first customer this week, announcing that pan-Caribbean mobile operator Digicel is adopting its Smart Energy Solution (SES), a set of technologies that allows a carrier to power down its towers when not in use.

It sounds like a simple idea, but it’s not an easy one to implement. Mobile networks are designed to deliver their full capacity at a moment’s notice in order to handle the unpredictable patterns of the cellphone-wielding public. Consequently most base stations remain at full power whether it’s rush hour or the wee hours of the morning.

eVolution’s technology constantly monitors, analyzing its radio coverage characteristics as well as daily traffic patterns. Based on that information it decides which base stations in which places can safely be powered down at night or during other off-peak hours without sacrificing coverage. As traffic patterns change, SES changes the mix of cells staying online and off.

Though Digicel runs networks throughout the Caribbean, Central America and in the Pacific Rim, its Jamaica network was the first to get the upgrade. Digicel began testing the platform in early 2012, and fully activated network-wide in October. After three months of operations, Digicel estimated eVolution cut its radio network energy consumption by 23 percent (though eVolution said it can boost savings up to 35 percent in some cases). Digicel believes it can save up to $1.4 million annually in electricity costs, by reducing its power consumption by 2.8 GWh while keeping 1.5 kilotons of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.

In the last few years, all of the radio vendors have been prioritizing energy consumption. They’ve drastically lowered the wattage of their base stations, and have introduced “sleep mode” features that allow them to power down when traffic is low. But it’s going to take decades for that newer infrastructure to replace the old 2G and 3G networks – some of which are over a decade old – that populate the world today. eVolution certainly isn’t going to lack for business if carriers start seriously prioritizing their energy footprints.

eVolution, now two years old, has raised $4 million from Breslau Capital Partners. While Digicel is the first carrier to commercially implement its technology, the startup said it is in talks with several other large Tier carriers worldwide, all of whom are suffering from high energy bills.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Key technologies for the smart city
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Qualcomm’s 8960 chipset, a dual-core Snapdragon processor with an integrated LTE chipset, will debut in multiple phones at MWC, Talluri said. That tight integration not only allows the radio and apps processor to share resources, cutting down on battery drain, but the silicon will be Qualcomm’s first 28-nanometer chip, making it one of the most power-efficient processors on the market, Talluri said.

“All of the LTE devices out there today use separate modems and use separate radios,” Talluri said. “With integrated LTE we’ll see significant improvements in power efficiency.”

Separate radios and processors aren’t the only causes of LTE’s notorious battery life problems. As I wrote last week, multiple antennas, multiple radio networks and the lack of LTE cell density are big contributing factors, but tighter integration with the processor and more efficient silicon design will go a long way to fix the problem.

A quad-core LTE smartphone might actually be a mixed blessing. All of the current quad-core designs out there — Qualcomm’s included — are standalone processors, meaning any device using them will compound its already poor power performance with a more powerful energy-sucking multimedia chip.

Qualcomm hopes it can offset the problem with its unique processor design. Unlike its competitors, Qualcomm’s four cores can run asynchronously, meaning each CPU doesn’t need to ramp up to its full clock speed when activated, Talluri said. By only partially activating each core, Snapdragon’s can incrementally scale their compute power, and thus their power consumption, he said.

Qualcomm may yet surprise us with a device, though, Talluri added. The chipmaker is still debating whether to demo at the show concept phones embedded with its quad-core 8064 Snapdragon, and while that silicon won’t be shipping in commercial handsets and tablets until the fall, some of Qualcomm’s customers may show off prototype devices of their own.

Qualcomm may sit this round out, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see other vendors tackle the quad-core phone at MWC. All eyes have turned to Nvidia, which is almost certainly going to stick its Tegra 3 processor in some vendor’s handheld device at the show.  As my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote, few smartphone apps are designed to take advantage of a quad-core configuration, so we might wind up with quad-core devices with a lot of horsepower but with nowhere to go.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

The good news is that handset makers and network vendors are doing plenty to boost the power efficiency of LTE devices, but the bad news is that as 4G technologies evolve, making our phone and tablet connections even faster, their radios will continue to voraciously eat up batteries. The question is can the former trend keep up with the latter.

Why your next LTE phone will be better

The first generation of LTE devices are unquestionable the most sophisticated smartphones and tablets we’ve seen to date in terms of processing power, screen-resolution and OS software. But the approach most vendors were forced to take to the radio was hardly delicate. In most cases an LTE chip was shoehorned into the device, which is hardly a formula for long battery life.

There’s a lot of work that silicon vendors are doing to squeeze better power performance out of those phones. Components that are today separated in the bowels of the phone such as the applications processor and baseband will be combined, allowing them to share power resources. The world’s largest radio chip vendor Qualcomm has released its first integrated Snapdragon processor and LTE radio modem, and according to Qualcomm product management VP Raj Talluri, we’ll see many devices supporting that next-gen chip at Mobile World Congress next week.

Texas Instruments is developing radio chips that require the device to lean less and less on a smartphone’s powerful applications processor to perform basic tasks, such as initiate NFC payments or perform quick GPS-location checks. The longer the apps processor remains dormant the less drain the phone will have on the battery.

Optimizing the network will also be a big source of power savings. As operators move their voice services onto LTE and build out both the coverage and density of their networks, they can offer LTE-only phones (Verizon is targeting its first such device for 2013). The fewer active radios there are sucking at the battery, the longer our phones will sustain charges.

As operators build denser networks, shrinking the size of LTE cells, phones won’t have to boost their transmit power as much to link to the tower. And as coverage improves, phones will stay within LTE’s warm embrace for longer intervals, eliminating the need to constantly negotiate between an operator’s multiple networks.

The tug-of-war in the handset

The big question is whether all of those tweaks and technologies will be enough. Power drain will be an ongoing problem for handset designers and their efforts are complicated by the fact that radios are becoming fundamentally less power efficient even as they become more bandwidth efficient. ABI Research analyst Jim Mielke summed up this way: “The bottom line is the higher the data rate and higher spectral efficiency, the higher the computing requirements — and thus power drain.”

That means future technologies like LTE-Advanced, which promises speeds as high 1 Gbps, will be ravenously hungry for power. Older generation technologies won’t be immune either. As T-Mobile moves to 84 Mbps HSPA+, it will add dual antennas to its devices, which suck down power just like their LTE brethren.

Mielke said some of that power drain is offset by the simple efficiency of its ultra-fast LTE modem  — the faster a device can download a video or file, the sooner it can shut down the data session and de-activate the radio. Theoretically faster download speeds and the LTE radio’s inherent power inefficiency should cancel each other out, but that’s assuming that consumers use LTE phones the same way they use 3G ones. It’s no coincidence that the newest smartphones don’t just have 4G radios, but also larger higher-definition screens and multi-core processors. LTE’s speeds allow the mobile public to do so much more with their handsets, and the tendency is take advantage of that raw power to stream more video, surf more Web pages and download more files – that is until data caps kick in.

Vendors like Motorola are combating the problem by sacrificing design for fatter batteries, as it did with the new Razr Maxx. The short term solution is for device makers to devote more device cost and space to the phone’s lithium-ion footprint. But ultimately battery technology is going to have to improve if the handset industry is going to keep up with advancements in radio technology.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

Why is LTE so greedy? For starters, the radio in your LTE device is doing a lot more than it ever did in your old 3G handset. The radio is the single biggest source of power drain in any device apart from the LED screen, but unlike the display, the radio is always on. And LTE is particularly hungry. The next time your new Galaxy Nexus or HTC Vivid conks out right after lunch, here are five reasons why:

• Your phone has rabbit ears. All LTE devices sold today use a technology called MIMO, which doesn’t just send or receive a single signal, but rather multiple parallel transmissions. Today’s devices support two such paths – future devices will support more — which means each phone has two antennas, each of which requires its own power amplifier. It’s not quite as bad as the running two phones off of a single battery, but you get the idea.

• Look at all those networks! Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS 4G phones aren’t just maintaining two LTE links, they’re running an additional radio to boot. Devices from these carriers have to remain in constant contact with both the CDMA network – to receive phone calls and texts – and the LTE network.

• LTE devices are co-dependent. Your screen may be dark, but your phone is constantly pining for the network. That means its periodically scans the airwaves around it to determine which tower it should tether itself to. The more networks there are to choose from the more scans it must make. With the typical operator sporting some combination of GSM, HSPA, CDMA and EV-DO systems — often multiple version of each in different frequency bands — there are a lot of other networks for an LTE device to flip between.

• Is that a tower on the horizon? Operators haven’t built out their new LTE footprints densely yet. With cells spaced much further apart, devices have to reach further – and thus boost their transmission power — to latch onto a tower. And since there are still plenty of coverage holes in these networks, phones are dropping in and out of LTE coverage quite often, initiating new rounds of scans and taxing the battery further.

• This ain’t no FM radio. There is a reason each generation of wireless technology is faster and more efficient than its predecessors. RF engineers are finding more and better ways to wrestle more bits into a radio wave. But, the more complex the waveform, the more computing power phone processors use up modulating and demodulating that radio wave. The 64-state quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques used in LTE are as complicated as they sound. Consequently, the faster and more spectrally efficient networks become, the more power phones will consume trying to make sense of their signals.

So are we doomed forever to a life of constantly reaching for our battery chargers? On Monday, we’ll explore what handset makers and network suppliers are doing to improve LTE battery life, but also how they may be fighting a losing battle.

Tesla coil image courtesy of Flickr user caseyyee

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Forecasting the future cloud computing market
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Shopping time is almost up for this year’s holiday season, but shipping deadlines have yet to elapse completely, and stores will still be plenty busy. In this week’s installment of our ongoing series, we’re looking at power accessories for Apple devices that could make great last-minute gifts and/or stocking stuffers.

Best backup battery: Just Mobile Gum Plus. There are a lot more solid options in this category than there were, say, a couple of years ago. But the Just Mobile Gum Plus wins for a number of reasons, including its high capacity (4400 mAh, enough for up to three charges for your iPhone), good looks and small, easily pocketable or stowable design. The Gum Plus is $69.95 plus shipping.

Best iPhone battery case: Mophie Juice Pack Plus. The iPhone battery case market is likewise crowded, but there are a few that have stood the test of time, and the Mophie Juice Pack Plus is one of them. Even considering the unfortunate recall that happened this year with its iPod touch model, the Juice Pack Plus is the best-in-class when you’re looking for something for your iPhone 4 or 4S extra battery life needs, because of its 2000 mAh capacity and pass through volume and sleep/wake controls. The Juice Pack Plus retails for $99.95.

Best charging adapter: PlugBug. The PlugBug from twelveSouth is a clever and invaluable add-on for people with a variety of Apple mobile devices. It’ll help convert your MacBook adapter so that it can also do double duty and charge your iPhone or iPad at the same time from the same outlet. Plus it can act as a standalone iPad charger and comes in an eye-catching red design that makes it harder to miss when you’re doing that final visual sweep of your hotel room. At the Apple store online, the PlugBus is $34.95

Best charging cable: The Magic Cable Duo. Innergie’s clever little cable with in-line, swappable 30-pin Apple dock connector and micro USB is able to charge pretty much any modern mobile device, including the above-mentioned Mophie Juice Pack Plus, as well as any Apple iOS gadget. The Magic Cable Trio adds mini USB to the mix, but we’re willing to bet that for most up-to-date gadget geeks out there, the Duo will cover all the necessary bases. The Magic Cable Duo sells for $19.99 on its own.

That’s our list, but feel free to argue our choices or voice your own suggestions in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Okay, the “miles” part is straightforward. And we can handle the “per.” But what’s up with the gallon? A gallon of what? Here we have all kinds of options, as humans are flex-fuel machines. But food energy is not much different from fossil fuel energy in terms of energy density.

Food Energy

Nutrition labels in the U.S. use kilocalories (or Calories with a capital “C”) as an energy measure. One kilocalorie (kcal) is 4.18 kJ of energy. Carbohydrates and protein come in at 4 kcal/gram, while fat registers 9 kcal/g. For comparison, coal ranges from 4–7 kcal/g, gasoline is 10 kcal/g, and natural gas is 13 kcal/g. So fat is pretty much like gasoline.

On one extreme, we could use a gallon of lard for our fuel. Though not a delight to eat, at close to 2000 kcal/$, lard is probably the best value in the grocery store in terms of energy per dollar (just a guess). This is truly the closest thing we could get to eating a gallon of gasoline proper. But we’ll tone it down and explore more standard fare.

Besides the energetic components, water and fiber also contribute to mass/volume of our food. On a recent trip to New Mexico for my experiment, I did a food experiment for blog’s-sake: for several days, I ate exclusively packaged foods with good labeling. Excluding drinks, the food averaged 1.85 kcal/g. If we then assume that the food has a density similar to that of water, we get 7000 kcal/gal (1 gal is almost 4 liters, which itself is 4 kg). By comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains 36.6 kWh, or 31,000 kcal — about 4.5 times more potent than our typical food mix (but beware the aftertaste).

Couldn’t we do better by eating a bucket of lard? Energetically, yes. But would you really feel like walking or biking afterward? Or would you rather lie on the floor moaning in discomfort? I will default to packing our gallon of food with the “standard” fare of burritos, lasagna, etc. to make for a realistic calculation, but we’ll occasionally multiply our result by a factor of 4.5 to get the gas/lard equivalent.

Biking Drag

For the bike, the approach is pretty similar to that for the car, in that the dominant effect is aerodynamic resistance. For the car case, we learned that the energy required to go a distance D at velocity v is ½c_DρADv², where A is the frontal area presented to the wind, ρ = 1.3 kg/m³ is the density of air at sea level, and c_D is the coefficient of drag (about 0.8 for a cyclist). If we take the area to be 0.5 m² (approximately a half-meter wide by a meter tall in biking posture), we find that it takes about 13 Newtons of force to push against the wind, turning into 13 kJ to travel 1 km (1000 meters) at 7 m/s (15 m.p.h.).  Interestingly, the effective “drag area,” c_DA ≈ 0.4 m² for a bicycle can be beat by an entire four-seat car having, for example, a frontal area around 2 m² and c_D ≈ 0.2.

As an aside, a generic shape not designed with aerodynamics in mind — let’s call it a man-bear-pig — will have a drag coefficient around 0.8–1.4. A trout, on the other hand, has a drag coefficient around 0.1. What we really need is a trout on a bicycle! Then we’d really be smokin’. We can turn the famous feminist slogan that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” on its head with the observation that a bicycle really screams out to have a fish ride it!

Once you’ve recovered from that perversion, we should add rolling resistance, using a coefficient of 0.004 times the 800 N weight (based on 80 kg mass, or 180 lb for rider plus bike). This presents an additional 3 Newtons of force to overcome. Work is force times distance, so over 1000 m this turns into 3 kJ for a total of 16 kJ to go one kilometer on the bike.

A mile is 1.6 times as far, so that we require 25 kJ = 6 kcal of delivered energy to bike a mile. This is a tiny fraction of the caloric content of our gallon of food, implying that we could go for almost 1150 miles per gallon!

Physique Physics

Alas, our bodies are not 100 percent efficient at converting food energy into mechanical output. But at about 25 percent efficiency, we’re surprisingly good considering that most cars are around 20 percent, and that an Iowa cornfield is only about 1.5 percent efficient at converting incoming sunlight into chemical storage.

Factoring in the efficiency, it takes about 24 kcal to cycle a mile, which yields 290 miles per gallon of food. 290 MPG! And the gas/lard equivalent is about 1300 MPG! But before our victory lap in the velodrome, we should put the bike activity in some context.

Long-Haul Biking

We have only counted the marginal energy required to bike. For short trips around town, this is the sensible number. But for a cross-country bike trip that may last days, you would consider the cycling to be your sole energetic activity and should count all your food energy as going in support of that mission (even sleeping and resting are necessary to keep going).

We all have a baseline metabolism to just run our bodies and carry out our daily activities. I’ll take the easy number of 2,000 kcal per day. Smaller or less active people will need less, and larger or more active people will use more. Cross-country bikers classify as “more active,” but we’re accounting for the activity explicitly, so we can use the couch-potato baseline.

If you’re in good-enough biking shape to contemplate a multi-day cross-country trip, you can probably maintain about 100 miles (160 km) per day. That 100 miles will take an extra third of a gallon of food per day, or an extra 2400 kcal. Each day therefore consumes about 60 percent of a gallon of food, and you would therefore make 160 miles on the 7000 kcal gallon of food (720 miles per gallon of gas/lard).

Biking Conclusions

So depending on the mode of biking and how you want to do your accounting, we got about 290 MPG in town, 160 MPG on the open road. Converting to the more universal and useful measure of energy per unit distance, these numbers map to 5 kWh/100-mi, and 2.8 kWh/100-mi. For comparison, electric cars turn in performances around 30 kWh/100-mi, and a 40 MPG car uses 90 kWh/100-mi (but beware a direct comparison between these last two: if the electricity is derived from fossil fuels, the fossil fuel investment becomes similar for the two: we’ll get to this for food in a bit).

We didn’t take hills into account, but to the extent that ups compensate downs, and you pedal at about the same intensity regardless, the power output is constant and we can use the average flatland speed to determine the rate at which energy is exerted. In the case of a net uphill climb, a daily gain of 1000 m (3300 feet) elevation adds 800 kcal of gravitational potential energy for our 80 kg (180 lb) rider-plus-bike—again using a 25 percent efficiency. This effectively adds a 33 percent energetic cost to the 100-mile day. We also neglected the start/stop energy dissipated in braking for the in-town rider, which will reduce the mileage a bit. So far, our bodies have not figured out regenerative braking.

These Boots Were Made for Walking!

And that’s just what we’ll do now. Walking is an entirely different regime from biking. Air resistance is negligible. Power expended against the air is proportional to the cube of velocity, so a biking speed of 7 m/s (15 m.p.h.) expends 7³~350 times as much power to fight the air as a walking speed of 1 m/s (2.2 m.p.h.).

But that doesn’t mean it comes for free. The energy cost of walking is dominated by the repeated lifting and swinging of legs. The smoothness of the terrain can have a noticeable effect on this energy cost. A table put together at BrianMac indicates that our 70 kg person (156 lb; dropped the bike) walking at 4 km/hr (2.5 m.p.h.) expends 3.8 kcal per minute. The mile will take 24 minutes to traverse at this speed, so 90 kcal will be consumed per mile. Recall that we could bike this distance for a smaller energy investment of 24 kcal. The same site has some figures for cycling, which all compute to about 45 kcal/mile for three different speeds. I find this to be suspicious, given that the drag energy varies by a factor of 5 for the three speeds. Their numbers are also well above what I compute, so I don’t know if the energy for walking is similarly elevated—but what’s a factor of two between friends?

For walking, our 7000 kcal gallon of food will propel us 75 miles down the road at 90 kcal/mi. So there we are: 75 MPG to walk, or 340 MPG on gas/lard. That means you should not eat a gallon of lard if there is not a hospital within 300 miles. Or maybe don’t do it anyway.

If we are on a multi-day trek covering 25 miles (40 km) per day, and lump the baseline metabolic energy into the mix as simply supporting the journey, we get about 40 MPG on food, and 180 MPG for gas/lard.

Summary Table

We’ve worked through a lot of numbers, under various interpretations. I hesitate to put these numbers into a table for fear that they will be taken literally and treated as definitive numbers. This is meant to be ballpark, people: good to a factor of two. So here’s a table.

Another consideration to bear in mind: in most cases, cycling and walking involve a single “passenger.”  A Prius loaded with four people effectively gets 200 MPG per passenger (18 kWh/100-mi per passenger), so make sure to account for this when making comparisons.

Fly Ointment

Our walking or biking economies look pretty decent stacked up against cars—especially if we considered consuming foodstuff as potent as gasoline. This is all well and good until one appreciates that because of the way Americans grow, harvest, distribute, and prepare their food, every one kilocalorie of food eaten has consumed about 10 kcal of fossil fuel energy (dominated by oil). Our 7000 kcal gallon of food therefore took 70,000 kcal of fossil-fuel energy to produce, or a little over two gallons of gasoline. So you would divide the “food economy” values we calculated by 2.2 to get the fuel economy that supported your bike trip or hike. Now walking consumes 18–34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70–130 MPG.

This should in no way be taken to suggest setting aside the bike or boots for a car that gets better performance. Rather, we should consider ways to make our agriculture or eating habits less energy-intense. By necessity, we once spent less than one kilocalorie of energy on each kilocalorie of food delivered to the plate—otherwise we would have starved ourselves out of existence. So we know that we don’t strictly require a 10:1 ratio of input energy to output energy. Choosing our food sources and food type can make a big difference here.

For instance, if you eat locally grown vegetables that took one kcal of fossil fuel energy for each kcal of food energy, you could claim that the 7000 kcal gallon of food that lets you walk 75 miles only cost a quarter of a gallon of fossil fuels, so your journey effectively gets 300 MPG in fossil fuel terms. Now that’s something to smile about!

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Image courtesy of Oskay, ethorson, the regeneration, cursedthing, Rafa-Alves, bareknuckleyellow.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry

With battery life so important to mobile device use, I love these types of charging stations. I have seen and used them extensively in airports and other public places as a result. The goCharge system used for the NYC Bar Network supports the charging of 16 devices at the same time and can top off a battery in as little as 10 minutes. That’s just enough time to try a few cheesy pickup lines at the bar and walk away with a full battery.

Aside from the obvious consumer benefit, these charging kiosks offer some advertising and revenue opportunity for storefronts.

Although these particular goCharge machines will offer free charging, retail owners who rent such kiosks can choose for consumers to pay for the charging convenience; goCharge makes stations that support credit card swiping and hard currency. Some of the machines also have displays that can be used for advertising. The kiosks in the Patrón partnership are branded with a Patrón XO Café and Ultimat Vodka motif.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

I first thought I could get by using just my Apple battery charger and the batteries that come with it, but that proved woefully inadequate. For one thing, the Apple charger is quite particular about its charging, and often you’ll come back to find a flashing amber light, indicating that the charge wasn’t successful for some reason. For another, those Apple batteries don’t keep their charge long, so there’s no use preparing backups.

So to ensure my Apple Wireless Keyboards, Trackpads, Mighty Mice and third-party peripherals always have power at the ready, I’ve created the following three-point plan:

1. Too many batteries is impossible

I always seem to think I have enough batteries to satisfy all my needs, and then I end up needing more. Obviously, don’t go crazy, but always try to have at least four more batteries on hand than you have actual need of for devices. I’m primarily talking about rechargeable, NiMH batteries, but it never hurts to have a supply of alkalines for backup, too, in case you get caught between charging cycles.

2. Low self-discharge is your best friend

People who may have ditched rechargeable batteries years ago because of the headaches of cycling, battery memory, and batteries that rapidly lose charge have a good reason to come back. Low self-discharge batteries are now available, which can retain up to 85 percent of their charge for up to a year. They also often come pre-charged, so you can use them right away, and newer batteries don’t have the same problem with charge memory as their predecessors.

My personal recommendation for good low self-discharge batteries are the Powerex Imedion variety. They carry a high-capacity compared to most (2400mah) and should be longer-lasting in digital devices like cameras and computer peripherals.

3. Two chargers is better than one

Getting a good battery charger will always help you keep thing properly powered up. Again, Powerex is a good, dependable brand in my experience. Their chargers are a little more expensive than most, but they provide a wealth of customizable options so that you can extend the life of your batteries and save money in the long run. The WizardOne is a good place to start, providing four charging slots for either AA or AAA NiMH batteries, with a backlit panel that lets you select charge/discharge rates and perform advanced tasks like complete battery cycling and break-ins for new batteries.

But in addition to a good charger, I also have a bad one. The Duracell 15 Minute Charger actually does what it claims to, but it makes a lot of noise and gets quite hot. Note, however, that frequent use will degrade the quality and life of your batteries (hence the “bad” descriptor), which is why I use the Duracell for emergencies only (like when my keyboard dies and I’m on a tight deadline).

Batteries are probably the biggest limiting factor when it comes to the enjoyment of consumer electronics, which is why having a good battery plan in place is crucial for gadget-lovers. Now that I’ve shared mine, do you have any other suggestions to add?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• In Q3, E-books and White Spaces Ruled
• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

I’ve reached out to Twitter for comment, but if this is true, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to those closely watching Twitter’s infrastructure moves. Update: Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said via email that Twitter has not abandoned the Utah site and added, “I can also confirm that we have multiple sites, but I won’t go into further detail.”

In December, Data Center Knowledge reported that Twitter was moving its servers to Sacramento, and  Sacramento would be the service’s first data center expansion instead of Utah. At the time, Twitter didn’t comment on its Utah plans, but in Marc,h it announced it had moved into its new data center without ever naming the location of that data center.

Then in April, Reuters  up on rumors that Twitter was moving servers from the Utah location to Sacramento, and indicated the data center in Bluffdale, Utah might no longer be Twitter’s home. The Salt Lake Tribune picked up on the rumors, and two days later confirmed that the “unnamed anchor tenant,” thought to be Twitter, was still in the Bluffdale facility.

The Reuters story cited insufficient power as a reason for Twitter’s move, and information offered by the Bluffdale, Utah facility’s owner C7 does show a marked reduction in power capacity from 10 megawatts available in Oct. 2010 when the facility launched to 8 megawatts of power available in March of this year, according to a second release. In April, Reuters quoted Wes Swenson, president of C7, as saying the facility had access to 5 megawatts.

The sources at Structure said the inability to get sufficient electricity to the site contributed to Twitter’s decision to move, and implied that the efforts to build in Bluffdale had been a disaster. Calls to Swenson were not returned.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang