Thunderbolt 2 charging

My 2011 Macbook Pro's MagSafe charging board died but the device still turns on. I heard that the Thunderbolt 2 which is on my Macbook can be used to charge the Mac by using a USB-C to Thunderbolt connector. Is this true?

How can I charge my MBP?

Thunderbolt 2 can not be used to charge your MacBook.

Unfortunately, the only way to charge the model you have is MagSafe – you have to replace the charging board if you want to keep using it.

The 2011 MacBook Pro has a peak AC adapter power draw of 60W. It is also Apple’s first laptop to include Thunderbolt, which had only recently been introduced, so it is actually a Thunderbolt 1 port, not 2. The Thunderbolt 1.0 specification allowed for only 10W of power delivery, which is so low that it wouldn’t have allowed the user to run their laptop without draining the battery. And in case you were also considering a USB solution, the maximum power that was capable of being delivered over USB at the time was 25W, according to the USB-BC 1.2 specification (see tables 5-1 and 5-2 for Vchg and Icdp, respectively).

Implementing either a Thunderbolt power delivery circuit or USB-BC requires additional hardware components, software development, and R&D time. Apple, like all large manufacturers, makes tremendous efforts to reduce the BOM (Bill Of Materials) for every product that they make, as even a $0.10 cost reduction by omitting a single component turns into many millions of dollars the company gains over the production lifetime of the product. Reducing hardware and software complexity also reduces both the engineering time and the risk of late-stage development or field failures, allowing Apple to release a product on time and with higher quality.

It is incredibly unlikely that Apple would have gone through the expense and effort of adding an auxiliary power circuit to the MacBook Pro when it could only supply less than half the power that the machine needs and there’s already a perfectly good MagSafe port. So, no, unfortunately: You will need to repair your MagSafe board.