iPhone Clean Energy Charging: what is it and how does it work?

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iPhone users now have a more sustainable charging option with iOS 16.1’s Clean Energy Charging.

This new feature waits to charge your iPhone to those times when lower carbon-emission electricity is available. This is done with a forecast of the carbon emissions from your local energy grid.

But, that’s not all it can do. So let’s dive into the feature a bit more and discuss how you can enable it on your own iPhone.

Clean Energy Charging will learn from you

The new feature also ties into the Optimized Battery Charging feature, which learns your charging habits. That way, your iPhone will still charge normally if it thinks you will take it off the charger.

Apple says it won’t engage the feature if you’re in a new location or anywhere you don’t regularly go. It monitors this through location data on your iPhone.

How do I enable Clean Energy Charging?

Open Settings

Tap on Battery

Tap on Battery Health & Charging

Toggle Optimized Battery Charging to on

That’s it, you’ve now either turned on or confirmed that Clean Energy Charging is enabled on your iPhone.

While your iPhone is on a charger and Clean Energy Charging is on, you’ll see a notification on the lock screen with an estimate of when your phone will be fully charged.

You can long-press this notification and press “Charge Now” to override the feature.

What to do if Clean Energy Charging isn’t working

If you notice Clean Energy Charging isn’t working, Apple has a few suggestions for settings that need to be enabled.

From Apple:

If you were having issues with the feature, the above tweaks should help. If not, you might need to contact Apple.

A more sustainable charging option

Now your iPhone will tweak when it charges your device, based on the carbon emission forecast from your local grid. It’s only available in the US, with no word from Apple on when it will get a wider rollout.

We like the option to use greener electricity to recharge our devices, and hope Apple is working on adding the feature to all of its devices.

Have any thoughts on this? Carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.