- Apple offers a Clean Energy Charging feature on the iPhone that aims to reduce your carbon footprint by selectively charging when lower carbon-emission electricity is available.
- If you're living in the US, the Clean Energy Charging feature is enabled automatically when you set up your iPhone or upgrade to iOS 16.1.
- This feature works only in locations you frequently visit or where you spend most of your time and regularly charge your iPhone for extended periods.
Clean Energy Charging is an interesting feature on iPhones that helps reduce your carbon footprint and electricity bill. This optional feature restricts iPhone charging to clean power sources. While this feature has existed since the launch of iOS 16.1, many iPhone users might not know about it. In this article, we’ll discuss what is Clean Energy Charging on iPhones, how it works, and how to disable it when a lower carbon-emission electricity is unavailable. Let’s move along and learn how to make climate-friendly choices.
What is Clean Energy Charging on iPhones?
With iOS 16, Apple introduced a Clean Energy Charging feature that aims to reduce your carbon footprint by selectively charging when lower carbon-emission electricity (like solar or wind) is available. When this feature is enabled and you plug your iPhone into power, your device gets a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid.
The iPhone automatically stops charging when lower carbon emission electricity is unavailable. It will resume the charging when a clean source is available again. This feature helps reduce your carbon footprint and lower the electricity bill as well.
How Clean Energy Charging Works on iPhones?
Apple’s Clean Charging feature works only in locations you frequently visit or where you spend most of your time and regularly charge your iPhone for extended periods, such as your home or workplace.
This feature won’t engage if your charging habits are inconsistent or you’re in a new location. Clean Energy Charging uses the Optimized Battery Charging feature to learn your usage and charging habits. This requires you to enable some iOS location settings. We’ve discussed them in the next section.
Prerequisites for Clean Energy Charging on iPhones
To allow the Clean Energy Charging feature to know your location, learn about your charging habits, and get the carbon-emission forecast for your area, you have to enable a few settings on your iPhone. Let’s have a look at them:
1. Clean Energy Charging: Go to Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health & Charging and verify the Clean Energy Charging feature is turned ON.
2. Location Services: Open Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Location Services and check if you’ve turned on the Location Services toggle. If not, turn it ON.
3. System Customization: When you’re in the Location Services section, scroll down to the bottom and tap on System Services. Here, turn ON the System Customization toggle.
4. Significant Locations: In the System Services section, choose Significant Locations and turn ON the Significant Locations option to allow your iPhone and iCloud-connected devices to learn about places significant to you and offer useful location-based information in various apps.
When you enable several location-related options on your iPhone, you might have privacy concerns. Fortunately, you need not worry at all because your iPhone and the Clean Energy Charging feature will never share any of your location information with Apple or third parties.
How to Off Clean Energy Charging on iPhones
At the moment, the Clean Energy Charging feature is only available to iPhone users living in the United States. This optional feature is turned ON by default when you set up your iPhone or upgrade to iOS 16.1. If you don’t want to use this feature, you can turn it off at any time, using the below steps:
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone and navigate to the Battery section.
- Here, choose Battery Health & Charging.
- Turn off the Clean Energy Charging. When prompted, select Turn Off or Turn Off Until Tomorrow.
How to Override Clean Energy Charging?
When you’ve enabled Clean Energy Charging and a cleaner electricity source isn’t available, your iPhone will automatically stop charging. In such instances, you’ll see a notification on the Lock Screen saying when your iPhone will be fully charged. Now, if you wish to have your iPhone fully charged sooner, you can choose to override Clean Energy Charging on your iPhone.
For this, touch and hold the notification and select the Charge Now option.
If you’re living in the US, the Clean Energy Charging feature is enabled automatically when you set up your iPhone or upgrade to iOS 16.1. That said, you have to manually turn on Location Services, System Customizations, and Significant Locations to use Clean Energy Charging on an iPhone.
No, the Clean Energy Charging and Optimized Battery Charging features aren’t the same. The Optimized Battery Charging feature learns from your everyday charging habits and prevents your iPhone from charging past 80%. On the other side, Clean Energy Charging suspends charging when lower carbon-emission electricity (like solar or wind) is unavailable. The Clean Energy Charging feature works with Optimized Battery Charging to learn your usage habits.
