this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

For those asking "Why bother? The energy usage is tiny".

https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/smartphones-and-tablets_en#consumers-1

Mobile phones and tablets produced under these rules will save almost 14 terawatt hours in primary energy each year by 2030. This is one third of the primary energy consumption of these products today. The new rules will also help to optimise the use and recycling of critical raw materials.

In 2030, the savings on EU27 acquisition costs are โ‚ฌ 20 billion, which combined with โ‚ฌ 0.6 bn lower energy costs and โ‚ฌ 0.8 bn additional repair costs, leads to โ‚ฌ 19.8 billion (22%) expense savings (โ‚ฌ 98 per household).

So basically, by promoting energy efficient and repairable devices, the plan is to save โ‚ฌ20bn annually in savings and not to generate 14TWh of electic power across the EU. That power saving is about the annual output of a single nuclear reactor. (1.6GW x 24h x 365.25d = 14TWh)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I was thinking at first that this would lead to even more aggressive "app optimization" where it would refuse to notify alarms you've explicitly set due to battery life concerns.

But instead there's a better way, which I hope manufacturers will take. Perhaps smartphone chips can stop chasing absolute peak performance and instead focus on good performance at a reasonable power budget.

Of course the biggest problem is bloated software but idk how we can fix that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I think the big value of these labels are not the energy class (like for bigger appliances) itโ€™s the fields under the energy class. Repeatability, (official declaration of) battery duration, simple to spot resistance to dust/water, etc

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I was about to comment how this number doesn't make sense, but reading the article they mention the power savings for phones specifically is actually 2.2TWh per year, which might be realistic. The rest of the 14 TWh comes from landline phones (2.2TWh) and energy used to produce phones that would be saved (8.1 TWh) from the lifetime extension measures, that aren't even related to the power efficiency of phones and won't take place in the EU.

However, even these numbers are overinflated when you take into account they're using a PEF factor of 1.9, meaning they multiply the actual power usage by 1.9 to adjust for stuff like power transfer losses (only 5-10%) and the inefficiency of generating power from e.g. fossil fuels (because e.g. petroleum might only convert 40% of its potential energy to electricity), but when people typically talk about power usage they're talking about the actual amount of electricity that needs to be generated, not this abstract representation of it, meaning that e.g. phone electricity savings are actually only 1.1TWh-1.2TWh.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Would be funny to know how the supposed 14TWh savings compare to the cost required to introduce/maintain these labels. And by costs I mean overall costs with everything related to it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

1.6MW is absolutely tiny for a nuclear reactor and most produce at least 200MW with a lot of them going up to a GW and not to say 14TWh isnโ€™t a huge amount of energy just that the comparison to a nuclear power plant is off

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

God I love the EU for its consumer protections. Based. ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The data seems to be weird/lacking so far, a lot of phones have "10" as "battery endurance in cycles", and some have the "Battery user-replaceable" even though it clearly isn't (e.g. glued on back glass)

PS: sorry I'm an idiot, I misunderstood what "battery endurance in cycles" meant (it seems to actually be "hundreds of cycles"). Also "battery user-replaceable" phones don't have a glued-on back indeed, I was looking at a wrong model.

This is sick! In 5-7 years when I'm looking for a new phone this will come in really handy :)

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

What do they actually mean by "model identifier"? Serial number? IMEI?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the ratng is too forgiving with not much room for improvement. A lot of phones are already class B og A so no incentive to innovate and improve or we are going to end up with nonsensical A++++ ratings.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I think it might be a way to keep phone manufacturers happy so they don't block the bill.

If most of the phones get a C or a D you can be sure that most phone manufacturers will lobby against the bill. So it's probably easier to pass a bill with meaningful criteria but most of them get a B or a A and in a few years adjust the levels required.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Starting today ? I bought a phone last week and it already had this label.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Law was in effect from yesterday, but that doesn't mean stores have to wait for that day to implement it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I like the other info, but I feel like energy efficiency is completely useless as a metric for phones. They already use such miniscule amounts of power that it really doesn't matter that much, especially compared to appliances.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Minuscule? A modern phone has a battery around a third or half that of a laptop (5000mAh x 3.7V = 18.5Wh). They also start having processors similarly capable. Gaming and other intense tasks can consume surprising amounts of energy. They put more and more emphasis on cooling, some phones including a fan. If we continue this way it starts to become expensive...

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean I already wrote this out in reply to another comment but by their own numbers on the site announcing this they say that all phones combined yearly consume ~ 5.2 TWh, that's 0.2% of the EU's total anual consumption of 2.7PWh. They expect to reduce the power consumption by 20% (which I find questionable but ok) by 2030, reducing the consumption by 1.1TWh, thats just 0.04% of the total consumption. It really doesn't matter that much. And as for your comment, laptops are already also extremely efficient, so it's not like their power consumption is that significant either.

For context, a day's charge of a phone is equal to running a typical 2kW heater for 1 minute, a years worth of charge is equal to running it for 6 hours. I like the label and don't think it's a bad addition, I just feel that that information could have been replaced with more useful stuff (like how ethically sourced it was or how long it will be supported for), the energy efficiency feels more like doing it just so it looks the same as the other ratings without much purpose for it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Those ideas are also good, but aren't mutually exclusive, you could have both.

PS: gaming laptops are not particularly efficient

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Btw, regarding gaming laptops, it's all relative really. I have a laptop I use as a server that runs 24/7 and it only uses like ~20W on average. That's about 15kWh/month, which is realistically not that much, about 2.5โ‚ฌ with our electricity costs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Good ol XY00x cycle count. That's a nice battery. Gotta say. Cause I know exactly what XY00x means.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I genuinely can't figure this out. I found an iPhone label with 1000x, which seems obvious. So what the hell is XY00? Everything else in the image is an example value.

Edit: right reading through this thread it seems its 100x the value, so XY represents a number, e.g. 15, then it would be 1500 cycles. The iPhone label I found must be from an earlier test or something. I like the rest but this seems unclear.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Then it will just say "1500x". The "XY00" is just for this example, and means it will always be divisible by 100.

Edit: on the printed label only. Not the website, which is stupid.