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Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

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Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#41

Does this mean the phone only charges during the day? It won't charge at night when solar and wind are least effective and fossil fuel power is used nearly exclusively? If that's true, it would be most inconvenient for me as I only charge my phone at night, while I'm sleeping. Seems simple enough to disable but to change the charging behavior on an update might be a bit of a shock if you expect your phone to charge a…

Wind power is generally higher at night.

And/or at least a higher proportion of energy use.

In reality, Apple is making the wrong calc: it should look at what the marginal electric generation carbon output is.

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#44

I’d like it to draw enough power to not use the internal battery but avoid charging when driving in a car if it’s at least X percent charged. I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.

Unless you have an EV charged only with renewable energy, I'm not sure there's any way to charge it with your car in a carbon-neutral way anyway...

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#45
This sounds like a feature that would be more useful in Germany, where the percentage of renewables varies wildly by time of day. Also, I hate the carbon footprint framing, a concept invented by fossil fuel companies to direct attention away from systemic issues. Climate change is not an individual issue and this feature at scale is already much more impactful than a thousand people checking their carbon footprint.

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#46

This is a pointless stunt. A refrigerator will use 10 to 20 times the electricity of phone that is going at 100% 24 hours a day. The impact of this is ultimately nothing.

A typical iPhone battery is on the order of 10 Wh. An iPad is more like 40 Wh. If you add up all the iPhones and iPads in the world, the combined battery storage is probably on the order of tens of GWh.

If the load shifting that this feature enables lets us avoid building out a proportional amount of utility-level battery storage, that is a pretty non-trivial savings in money and resources. A single GWh of utility-level battery storage costs on the order of half a billion, so the return on investment for coding a feature like this into iOS is probably pretty good.

It's not gonna save the world on its own, but it's still a nice win.

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#47
post #25

This is a pointless stunt. A refrigerator will use 10 to 20 times the electricity of phone that is going at 100% 24 hours a day. The impact of this is ultimately nothing.

Let's assume an average iPhone battery is 5.45Wh and that they are charged to full every other night. That is 0.99kWh/year. We know there are 136 million iPhone users in the USA (1) so we are looking at 134GWh of electric consumption shifted to green generation. Now assuming those phones were previously charged on the standard energy mix in the USA that is 0.368kg of co2 saved per device per year, or 501,584,76kg of…

> consumption shifted to green generation

Where is the idea that that 'green generation' wouldn't be used or created without this iphone feature? This doesn't make sense from multiple angles.

Also refrigerators use 1 to 2 kilowatt hours per day.

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#48
post #44

I’d like it to draw enough power to not use the internal battery but avoid charging when driving in a car if it’s at least X percent charged. I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.

Unless you have an EV charged only with renewable energy, I'm not sure there's any way to charge it with your car in a carbon-neutral way anyway...

Depends where your grid electricity comes from. ICE is a pretty damn inefficient way to generate electricity (and costly when it comes to its excess taxation).

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely terrible for usability though, which is why no one has one in their kitchen.

Would make a lot of sense if it was just built into the counter-top imo.

Nah, that just makes that section of countertop "forbidden space". Can place anything on it (toaster, microwave, coffeemaker, etc.), can't use it for prep space unless you already know you won't need anything from the freezer. Can't let any dirty dishes pile up there.

But why not have a chest freezer underneath the countertop, but as a pull-out drawer? Same benefits of a top opening, but no need to dedicate a section of countertop for the lid to open.

Re: Use clean energy charging on your iPhone

#50
post #43

Why US only? Are carbon emissions only a problem there?

It uses data about the current generation of the grid, and I guess they only added data sources for the US so far.

I’m in Canada where we’re (almost all) on the same interconnections as US. Texas (and maybe Quebec) are the bigger outliers when it comes to outlier systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reli...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmi...

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