iOS’s Clean Charging (And Things Like It) Are Greenwashing But The Idea Has A Lot of Potential Beyond Consumer Electronics

Recently, iOS announced Clean Charging which tries to charge an iPhone whenever more green energy is availible. Microsoft is doing something similar with Windows and Xbox updates. Some have classified this as “woke” because of terminal culture war brain, but a few of these things haven’t actually assesed the potential impact of these. I read an annoying article on this and decided to figure out what emissions iOS’s charging would reduce and it’s not much so it’s practically greenwashing.

Estimating The Potential Emissions Reduction From Clean Charging

Note that this is just an estimate and if you want to do this for real there’s a lot of nuances you need to consider.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max which comes with an environmental impact report [PDF: 4MB].

It has a 14.13Wh battery that charges at about 87%, requiring at least 16.2Wh of electricity to charge. Assuming that I charge my phone once a day, I’ll use nearly 6kWh of energy to charge my phone each year.

The most polluting form of electricity, coal, releases 1kgCO₂/kWh so charging my phone releases 6kg of emissions each year¹.

There are about 1.2 billion iPhones being used. Assuming that they’re all iPhone 12 Pro Maxes like mine, that comes up to 7.2MtCo₂ each year.

Is 7.2MtCo₂ a lot?

That sounds like a lot but it needs some context. A car is about 4.6t of CO₂ so this smart charging can remove about 1.5 million cars off the road, more than they claimed removing the charger from the box would do (450,000 cars).

Again sounds like a lot but if you compare it to what we need to eliminate, well…

This will save fractions of a percent within each sector. Not that big of an impact, if at all. Looking at the emissions breakdown, 82% of the phone’s emissions are in production as opposed to 15% in use, so if a better way to reduce emissions would be for Apple to improve their manufacturing processes. They are doing that to their credit, but it would be more effective if they made it easier to use their devices for longer. They do get 6 year updates, and while they’re relativley easy to repair, Apple does it’s best to undermine third party repair.

This Could Be Done on A Bigger Scale

It doesn’t seem like clean charging or clean updates will accomplish much to reduce emissions. Thing is, the idea behind it might be more impactful. Given that one of the strategies to reduce emissions involve scaling up renewable energy, we need to deal with the intermittency that comes with it.

One strategy to do that would be to adopt load shifting [VIDEO: 24:26] where certain things can be done while there’s a lot of solar availible. This can be tricky to get right and it can piss off consumers but it works better with industrial workloads. First thing on my mind is making green hydrogen, but what if intensive server side computation like video encoding was done when there’s a lot of solar, or you move data around to get it processed in a place with a lot of renewable energy?

I’m just spitballing here, but this could do a lot to ensure that excess energy doesn’t get wasted. I guess clean charging is a smallscale attempt at doing this. Alternativley, we can get over our fear of nuclear energy and build that out but thats just me.

Verdict: Greenwashing But It Can Get Somewhere

One thing I find annoying about certain ways to reduce emissions is that they aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I think of influencers who tout living in a rural area and growing their own crops while having to drive a gas car if you want to contact anyone. The big things matter!

Not saying we shouldn’t care to reduce emissions in our small sectors, but realize what the real culprit is. In computing, 80% of it’s emissions come from energy. Changing the energy source would do more than restricting the colours you use because they use more LED energy.