The best charger that he analyzed was a Samsung oblong charger that had a vampire draw of 18mw. At 18mw, if it was plugged in all year without doing any charging, it would consume a total of .12 kilowatt-hrs of electricity. $0.01/yr is pretty close to zero power use. There's no theoretical reason that figure could not be improved upon.
However, it is probably the wrong end to optimize on. From the same post, you'll see that the BEST of these chargers was 80% efficient under load, meaning when it's actually in use, it's only putting 80% of its draw into the device. If it were charging only 1 hour per day, at its in-use draw of 2.4A, 21 kilowatt-hours are lost per year doing the actual charging, at a cost of $2-3 per year (in the US).
In that article, he measures the idle power usage of a bunch of chargers. Some use as little as 19 milliwatts. The electricity cost of leaving that charger plugged in all year is miniscule.
I don't see any reason it couldn't be true. Just put a relay inside the charger, and when the phone is plugged in, steal enough power from the phone to set the relay. When the phone is unplugged, the charger's circuitry detects that, and sets the relay. Of course this wouldn't work with a completely dead phone battery. There's probably a clever way to get around this, maybe by utilizing the resistance between pins when a phone is plugged in, but I doubt that's worth it in practice (edit: I read the page more closely, and it turns out they just have a manual button for this; clever indeed).
What is the problem being solved which makes it possible to do this? Or, in other words, why don't we have this as a standard way for chargers?
Is it cost? I understand nothing about electronics really, but I'd guess at least one way to do this would be a microcontroller polling the wire and controlling a relay to turn the device on/off, no? I repeat, I understand nothing of these things. :)
The reason it isn't standard is because you aren't really saving a whole lot of electricity or money by doing this.
If you purchased this charger, I don't believe you would ever break even with the extra cost to buy this charger with the amount of money saved in electricity not used before it broke.
Well, it can be true. It would be in fact not to difficult, but the issue is, of course, cost (and maybe turning it on again when the device is plugged again)
Also, a regular charger does not use the same amount of energy with the device charging as it does with the device off, it's wasteful, surely, but not as much as people think.
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...
The best charger that he analyzed was a Samsung oblong charger that had a vampire draw of 18mw. At 18mw, if it was plugged in all year without doing any charging, it would consume a total of .12 kilowatt-hrs of electricity. $0.01/yr is pretty close to zero power use. There's no theoretical reason that figure could not be improved upon.
However, it is probably the wrong end to optimize on. From the same post, you'll see that the BEST of these chargers was 80% efficient under load, meaning when it's actually in use, it's only putting 80% of its draw into the device. If it were charging only 1 hour per day, at its in-use draw of 2.4A, 21 kilowatt-hours are lost per year doing the actual charging, at a cost of $2-3 per year (in the US).