Well…
Apple iPhone users were stirred up on Sunday as they became aware of a somewhat new feature intended to reduce the carbon footprint by charging only when lower carbon-emission electricity is available.
Apple introduced Clean Energy Charging with the release of iOS 16.1 on Oct. 24, 2022. The company claims that when the mode is enabled and a phone is connected to a charger, the iPhone gets a report of carbon emissions generated by the local energy grid and uses that information to determine when to charge the phone. . . .
Some of the users who tweeted about the new feature wanted to find a way to turn it off.
It’s not difficult — it took me about a minute. But the fact that Apple had installed this “facility” as the default mode was both presumptuous and irritating. It was also annoying that this had been installed months ago. I hadn’t noticed, but then who checks for this sort of thing? Don’t @ me.
Fox Business:
One user claimed he wanted to turn the feature off to leave the biggest footprint possible, while another wanted to know if there was a way to select whether to use coal or diesel generated electricity to charge their phone.
The answer to that last question is (probably) to move to China and charge your iPhone there.
Speaking of which, on some estimates roughly 95 percent of iPhones are manufactured in China. Less concerned, I suspect, by any climate considerations than the risk involved in having 95 percent of the production of a key product located in a hostile superpower, Apple is beginning to move some of its iPhone production to India, with more, reportedly, to follow. From a business point of view that makes a lot of sense, but where, I wonder, does India get its electricity? That is, I should say, a rhetorical question.
According to India’s Ministry of Power, as of January 31, 49.7 percent of India’s installed power capacity came from coal, and another 7 percent or so from fossil fuels. Renewables (including a lot of hydro) accounts for around 40 percent (and is set to increase). But thanks to intermittency, particularly of wind and solar power (the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine), the figure given for renewables capacity has a way of falling a long way short of what is actually generated. The usual figure given for the percentage of India’s electricity that comes from fossil fuels is in the high 70s.
Indeed, as (citing Bloomberg) I noted recently, that’s why the chairman of India’s largest car company has his doubts about electric vehicles (EVs), at least for his own country.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads, believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.
India’s largest automaker reckons that vehicles powered by hybrid technology, natural gas and biofuels present a better path toward a cleaner future than electric cars considering the nation generates about 75% of its electricity from dirty coal, Chairman R. C. Bhargava said in an interview.
“Talking about electric cars without looking at the greenness of the electricity generated in the country is an inadequate approach to this problem,” Bhargava said in an interview from his home in Delhi last week. “Until the time we have a cleaner grid power, it’s necessary to use all the available technologies like compressed natural gas, ethanol, hybrid and biogas, which will help reduce the carbon footprint and not push any one technology.”
As I reread that story and straightened my tinfoil hat, dark thoughts entered my mind. What if a facility not too dissimilar to Apple’s (perhaps — even darker thoughts crowd in — without an override) came as a standard in EVs or their chargers? And what then, if an electricity grid of which the reliability had been eroded by decarbonization (thanks to underinvestment in conventionally generated power, overinvestment in renewables, or both) came under pressure? And what . . .
Then I brought this line of thought to a halt. It was clearly nonsense.
Unrelated
New York Times (September 1, 2022):
Heading into one of the busiest holiday travel weekends in the United States, and just a week after approving a bold plan to ban the sale of new gasoline cars, California asked electric vehicle owners this week to limit when they plugged in to charge.
The Swiss car importers lobby hit back on Monday at the government’s proposal to limit the use of electric vehicles in any power crunch, saying the mere suggestion could prompt consumers to opt for autos that burn fossil fuels.
Note: This was only a proposal.
And here is another unrelated proposal:
The Daily Mirror (September 18, 2020):
A new wave of smart meters will give energy suppliers the right to automatically switch off your supply if demand is too high.
Under a series of modifications being proposed, networks will be allowed to turn off a household’s heating or electricity without warning or compensation for those affected.
The plans, [put forward] by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), would give networks the right to decide when the grid is in a state of ’emergency’ which would allow them to switch off your supply.
It would give firms permission to temporarily turn off appliances with high usage, such as heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. . . .
SSEN stressed the measures would only be used with the full consent of the customer, which can be revoked at any time.
It would also only apply to heating systems with a heat pump and not those powered by gas.