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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.

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.

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

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 isn’t a huge amount of energy just that the comparison to a nuclear power plant is off

... optimise the use and recycling of critical raw materials

Does anyone have an idea how this helps with recycling?

Thanks

This happened with appliances. They ended up with the silly A++++ ratings added in 2010 as otherwise everything would be an A.

In 2021 they decided to redefine grades instead. A fridge at A+++ became a C. A became the top grade again.

It's also worth noting that as they push the whole scale and G into being more efficient that essentially bans products that can't achieve a rating.

if everything becomes an A the system has worked and increased the efficiency across the market. They'll adjust the goals every 5 to 10 years.

The EU battery life measure is going to be the most interesting battle ground in my opinion. "All day battery life" will have a measured metric in hours.

If the EU have managed to make that metric representative of an amount of screen time in a busy day it could become the first thing consumers look at. Or at least a deal breaker when that number is too low.

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.

You don't care about battery life?

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...

I feel this way about washing machines already. Oh wow, this one uses 0.6kwh less per wash. That's like 30kwh a year!

meanwhile my fridge

I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Times any of those metrics by the literal billions of phones out there and it adds up quite quickly.

Sure on an individual basis it might mean savings of a few bucks over the course of the lifetime of the phone, but scale that up and we're talking entire power plant's worth of electricity that isn't required.

Agreed, it's just that they unified it for all electronic devices.

Kinda dumb.

Ahem:

Article 8

Entry into force and application

This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day > following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union.

It shall apply from 20 June 2025.

This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.

Done at Brussels, 16 June 2023.

Source: EurLex

I wonder if that's the date it was created or agreed but there's a lead time to allow manufacturers to test and prepare.

I guess it is part of repairability class.

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