Apple "Clean Energy" charging

[mrtzkyle]

Summary

In March 2023 Apple pushed a region specific update to iPhone's with their 16.3 update, one major change includes an automatically selected "Clean Energy Charging" option that will only charge your phone while it is on cleaner energy sources.

 

Quotes

Quote

"your iPhone gets a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid and uses it to charge your iPhone during times of cleaner energy production"

 

My thoughts

 I personally feel that this should not have been an automatically selected option and i personally don't even have an iPhone. The thing is, the charging takes much longer during this time and this can cause issues of your phone not being fully charged while say, sleeping and having charging overnight. 

 

Sources

https://mashable.com/article/apple-iphone-clean-energy-charging
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323

[starsmine]

it explicitly tells you what is going on when it triggers and is easily overridden temporarily or permanently.

[mrtzkyle]

Just now, starsmine said:

it explicitly tells you what is going on when it triggers and is easily overridden temporarily or permanently.

Did not know that, I just hadn't seen it anywhere and wasn't sure if people knew about it.
Since it does that then I will remove this post, thank you so much, have a great one!

 

[Bananasplit_00]

That seems like a really bad UX thing to have enabled by default, interesting to have the option to turn it on I guess but nice if you try to charge your phone and it just doesn't

[dilpickle]

MKBHD explained it nicely

 

 

[Godlygamer23]

It's fairly easy to turn off anyway. It's on for me, and I haven't seen anything about it. This is the first time I've heard about it.

 

Here it is in my charging settings:

Spoiler

UPDATE: To be honest, you can get around it completely by either turning it off, or simply disabling location data to System Customisation. 

Edited March 5, 2023 by Godlygamer23

[SansVarnic]

1 hour ago, mrtzkyle said:

"Clean Energy Charging" option that will only charge your phone while it is on cleaner energy sources.

... now explain to me how it knows it's on "clean" energy? Last I checked my outlet has no means to pass on this information and electricity from a gas generator is the same as electricity from a wind generator.

Probably the biggest attempt at bs marking I've seen so far this year.

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, SansVarnic said:

... now explain to me how it knows it's on "clean" energy? Last I checked my outlet has no means to pass on this information and electricity from a gas generator is the same as electricity from a wind generator.

Probably the biggest attempt at bs marking I've seen so far this year.

It's probably based on the data it gets from your local government for what resources it's primarily using in a given area. However, I agree that it's too ambiguous and probably useless. It probably doesn't have much of an impact, especially if most people disable it anyway. 

[da na]

This is giving me flashbacks to the guy arguing that the Xbox's energy efficient sleep mode was a socialist attempt to destroy your console or whatever

[da na]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

It's probably based on the data it gets from your local government for what resources it's primarily using in a given area. However, I agree that it's too ambiguous and probably useless. It probably doesn't have much of an impact, especially if most people disable it anyway. 

I have a little IoT desk.... thing? Not sure what to call it. Anyway, one of the applications for it is a graph that shows how much of California's power grid is running on renewable sources. It's interesting to see wind and solar percentages change throughout the day. From just this information, I would assume some states or power companies report that data to a publicly accessible database.

[starsmine]

21 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

... now explain to me how it knows it's on "clean" energy? Last I checked my outlet has no means to pass on this information and electricity from a gas generator is the same as electricity from a wind generator.

Probably the biggest attempt at bs marking I've seen so far this year.

your local area has a known energy mix that changes over time of day.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, mrtzkyle said:

one major change includes an automatically selected "Clean Energy Charging" option that will only charge your phone while it is on cleaner energy sources.

How the heck would it know?

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, starsmine said:

your local area has a known energy mix that changes over time of day.

Well there's a problem with that. Going to speak about how it works here.

 

The data is only updated hourly and it's only provisional data and due to the complexity of utility girds the specific energy source composition of a specific outlet in the building your are in isn't terribly accurate (not that this feature is designed for specific induvial level). Then after I think 2 days the data is finalized and then the energy unit pricing calculation is also finalized, the energy providers are paid on this and the retailers are charged based on this.

 

So basically this is "great", Apple is getting inaccurate and incomplete data about the energy sources being used to supply the grid that is at least 1 hour out of date.

 

Optics wise this looks great, so long as you do zero looking in to it 

[TopWargamer]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

How the heck would it know?

Apple is likely pulling info from the EPA and local power providers to see which parts of town are plugged into a renewable energy source.

[starsmine]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well there's a problem with that. Going to speak about how it works here.

 

The data is only updated hourly and it's only provisional data and due to the complexity of utility girds the specific energy source composition of a specific outlet in the building your are in isn't terribly accurate (not that this feature is designed for specific induvial level). Then after I think 2 days the data is finalized and then the energy unit pricing calculation is also finalized, the energy providers are paid on this and the retailers are charged based on this.

 

So basically this is "great", Apple is getting inaccurate and incomplete data about the energy sources being used to supply the grid that is at least 1 hour out of date.

 

Optics wise this looks great, so long as you do zero looking in to it 

Being that coarse with data is just fine as far as I understand it. You are getting 80% of the benefits still. The average slope between two points can give you a decent enough approximation.

It just ends up being a sum of delta hour of the full integral with delta infinitum. 

Its not like you are that far off, and left biased is just the quck way to do sums, you can do them with trapezoids and get much closer with the same data.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Being that coarse with data is just fine as far as I understand it. You are getting 80% of the benefits still. The average slope between two points can give you a decent enough approximation.

It just ends up being a sum of delta hour of the full integral with delta infinitum. 

It doesn't change the problem that it's going to be really inaccurate about whether or not you, with your phone, is actually charging with clean energy. Actually knowing that you specifically are using renewable energy when your section of the grid has 5 different energy source inputs and the tracking is only from those input points then all you can really know is that across this large geographic area that the average supply is X% renewable/clean. What you don't know is that if you plugin your phone your net increase will cause an increase of supply from which of those 5 sources specifically.

 

If the wind generation is at 100% capacity and the overall supply is 70% "clean" and the only other source is gas and you plugin 1,000 phones to charge 100% of that will come from gas supply. That net increase could have only come from the gas supply.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

It doesn't change the problem that it's going to be really inaccurate about whether or not you, with your phone, is actually charging with clean energy. Actually knowing that you specifically are using renewable energy when your section of the grid has 5 different energy source inputs and the tracking is only from those input points then all you can really know is that across this large geographic area that the average supply is X% renewable/clean. What you don't know is that if you plugin your phone your net increase will cause an increase of supply from which of those 5 sources specifically.

 

If the wind generation is at 100% capacity and the overall supply is 70% "clean" and the only other source is gas and you plugin 1,000 phones to charge 100% of that will come from gas supply. That net increase could have only come from the gas supply.

Its not that it wont be charged off gas its that 70% of the charging energy is coming from wind in your example rather then hypothetically charging when wind is at 40% capacity and 25% of mix. It flattens the curve, while lowering the necessity of peaker plants. 

Different areas have different reporting standards,
like California afaik reports far more often, and there are days when net load likely dipped below zero and the system had to shed. I dont know what 1 hour is too course a data set with trapezoidal sums you wont be off that much. 


like look how close it fits with some highly coarse data, and its pretty similar to the expected duck curve, 

Reporting from https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx is every 5 minute, not every hour. And there are days you might see the duck go negative and the grid has to shed.


Per user its not much, but given that a state like california has millions of iphones that might be plugged in at the same time, thats a megawatt or two in just that state alone

[CommanderAlex]

53 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

This is giving me flashbacks to the guy arguing that the Xbox's energy efficient sleep mode was a socialist attempt to destroy your console or whatever

Lmao, I remember that one. 

 

 

To the point of this thread: I charge my phone typically in my car as I don't charge it overnight at home and since I'm driving anyway and using gas, I'll charge it at the same time then. Weekends though are a different story. 

[TetraSky]

So... It doesn't change based on the time of day where renewables might not be available at a certain location? Completely pointless for my in my province considering the entirety of our power is renewable and a drop in the bucket for where its not (what about places that are only powered by fossil fuel?)
...
But I'm sure that will offset the non repairable devices they keep putting out and all the chargers and cables that went into a landfill when they changed to lightning and now when they will change to usb c.

[TopWargamer]

Y'all dying on some weird hills in this thread.

[SansVarnic]

41 minutes ago, starsmine said:

your local area has a known energy mix that changes over time of day.

Mix a pint of spring water with a gallon of tap water.... tell me when I drink the spring water, then tell me when I'm not .. then I will be impressed and accept what apple is trying to push, otherwise, I'm sticking with my original comment.

[leadeater]

18 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Its not that it wont be charged off gas its that 70% of the charging energy is coming from wind in your example rather then hypothetically charging when wind is at 40% capacity and 25% of mix. It flattens the curve, lowering the need while lowering the necessity of peaker plants. 

Nope, you've made a logic error. If I add 100kWh of demand and it must come from gas then 100kWh of energy is being supplied by gas. This is a micro level issue, if you have an option on your phone to only charge when being supplied by "clean energy" then the actual ability to actually do this is unfortunately very limited.

 

You can decide not to add 100kWh of load because the overall current supply makeup is below 50% clean energy however in the situation here and the situation of 70% clean but 100% clean supply utilization both would result in adding 100kWh of unclean energy and you are charging with unclean energy.

 

How this helps is a little lacking. It sounds good, but I really don't think it has much relevance or will change anything really.

 

It would be equally effective to not allow phone charging between 6am-9am and 5pm-7pm than it would be trying to look at the cleanness of supply.

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Reporting from https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx is every 5 minute, not every hour. And there are days you might see the duck go negative and the grid has to shed.

This will absolutely only be provisional data. I can also get 5 minute data points but these are not used for any finalized data that is accurate that is used for billing.

 

https://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/prices#!#q.run_types_=A,D&q.market_types_=E&q.nodes_=BEN2201,HAY2201,OTA2201&q.date_from=2023-03-05&q.date_to=2023-03-05&q.tp_from=1&q.tp_to=48&q.tp_roll_back=7&q.tp_roll_fwd=7&v.search_include=&v.search_exclude=

 

Edit:

Also I was wrong, it's half hourly or 48 trading periods in a day.

[starsmine]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Nope, you've made a logic error. If I add 100kWh of demand and it must come from gas then 100kWh of energy is being supplied by gas. This is a micro level issue, if you have an option on your phone to only charge when being supplied by "clean energy" then the actual ability to actually do this is unfortunately very limited.

 

You can decide not to add 100kWh of load because the overall current supply makeup is below 50% clean energy however in the situation here and the situation of 70% clean but 100% clean supply utilization both would result in adding 100kWh of unclean energy and you are charging with unclean energy.

 

How this helps is a little lacking. It sounds good, but I really don't think it has much relevance or will change anything really.

 

It would be equally effective to not allow phone charging between 6am-9am and 5pm-7pm than it would be trying to look at the cleanness of supply.

  

There are a lot of massive grid areas now that get >100% of their grid from renewables at different times of the day and year, and it can be predicted with enough accuracy that you can have the phone choose to do it. Sure the average is well below 100, but load shifting what we can to those moments of over 100%

Flatting out the duck also incentives more rapid build out and build up as less engineering into load balancing the grid is necessary making it cheaper at the grid scale per new MW of renewables added.

Peoples microgrids at home often will do >100% and it is more efficient load shift to just use it on the microgrid then to shed it back onto the larger grid (transformers and wire length all are passive resistors)

If what you argue is true, there would be zero reason to be building storage the way we do now. 

[TopWargamer]

All this arguing about grid this, clean energy that. All nonsense.

 

If you're not hand crank charging your electronics you hate the planet.