With iOS 16.1, iPhone users in the US can choose to charge their phones only with "green" energy.
What is the iPhone's 'Clean Energy Charging' feature?
Apple’s Clean Energy Charging works by consulting a forecast of the carbon emissions on your local energy grid, then only charging when those emissions are lower. This may sound like an esoteric change, except for two reasons: It’s enabled by default on all iPhones running iOS 16.1, and there are hundreds of millions of iPhones in use worldwide, all of which need to be charged.
“There are 16 billion mobile devices worldwide that need to be charged every day. The average consumption of these devices can be higher than the average consumption of a country like Denmark,” Aimee Howard, a renewable energy power electronics specialist with 28 years of experience in the aerospace industry and developing power electronics for sustainable manufacturing, told Lifewire via email.
When I saw this feature, my immediate thought was, “Why doesn’t the grid just store its own low-carbon energy and use it instead of producing more polluting energy?” But of course the answer is more complicated.
