All about charging our electronic devices with clean energy

Charging iPhone using clean energy. Why is he so criticized? We explain what is behind these features.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the new Green Energy Charging feature in the iPhone. Marques Brownlee sees this as a real plus for the environment, while others criticize it for slowing down recharge. It’s a little more complicated, and it doesn’t just affect your iPhone. Apple isn’t the only company to offer such a feature. Microsoft, for example, offers something similar, and it was before the Apple brand.

How clean energy works

Whether it’s charging your iPhone or installing updates on your Xbox, the principle is the same: your device will look for carbon intensity data, if available, to determine the period your region has the most service from “clean”sources. The process does not wait until only natural sources remain, but selects the “least dirty”vertices. The system then schedules background tasks during these cleaner power periods to reduce the device’s overall carbon footprint.

Therefore, your iPhone will wait until the electricity in your network is as green as possible in order to charge your device. If you pick up your iPhone during this time, you’ll see a warning that charging is on hold until low carbon power is available. This is an additional option in the Optimized Battery Charging feature. In theory, iOS will only use this clean energy charge when it thinks you don’t need the device. That’s why Apple explains that it won’t launch outside of your habits, like when you’re traveling.

On Microsoft’s part, your Xbox or your PC may wait until it has the smallest energy impact possible to trigger an automatic update. On Xbox, Extinction mode is selected by default and consumes less power than sleep mode. In particular, the power off mode supports automatic updates, but it takes about 45 seconds to turn on the machine again. Voice activation or remote wake up is not available.

However, this is nothing new. Microsoft began testing this approach in March 2022, and Apple released Clean Energy Charging as part of iOS 16.1 on October 24 of that year.

But why do people criticize these features so much?

There seem to be two camps here. Some argue that Microsoft is forcing Xbox users to accept these new environmental regulations, and these people are often reluctant to let companies take advantage of green energy in general. Big anything! However, you can disable this option. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging and turn off Clean Power Charging. Apple allows you to disable this option for a day if you wish. On Xbox, go to Profile & System > Settings > General > Power Options.

Which leads to the second major criticism: these settings are most often enabled by default after a system update. Apple doesn’t ask you if you want to use it, it does it for you. Just like how Microsoft defaults to Power Off Mode rather than Sleep Mode.

We can understand those who don’t like it when features are imposed in this way without explicit consent, but we also understand why companies do it this way. For these savings to have an impact, it really takes massive participation from all of these devices. And most users will never know the difference. Your iPhone will probably charge clean energy overnight, your Xbox can update at other times and you won’t notice a thing. But it will reduce our carbon footprint.