by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-24 13:43:43+00:00
This is just me thinking this through and is not a claim to be authoritative whatsoever.

The average power draw of a cell phone is what, 4 watts? 6 watts? Lets say 10W, which is silly high (most can only charge at around 20W for an hour and a charge lasts at least 12 hours, but lets just take a high number.) At 10W constant draw it would consume 87,600Wh per year. Lets round up for inefficiencies and call it 100kWh. (That's about $11/yr of electricity where I live, about 3 cents per day but this isn't my point.)

(For reference, my Pixel 8 Pro gets 16+ hours on average if I don't put it on my wireless charger, and it's battery is only 5000mAh, which my calculations say is around 1W of average draw. This matches what I see on the display on my charging cord.)

An average person in Norway consumes 24000kWh per year (according to wikipedia. Someone in Spain would be about 5000kWh). This regulation will cut their cell phone power usage by about 1/3 (based on the quoted estimated savings and the # of people in the EU, but I don't believe these numbers), so maybe about 33kWh per year (and remember this is using absurdly over estimated numbers). That is approximately a 1/1000 reduction in power usage (or 1/200 in spain). Using realistic numbers I don't see how it's possible to anticipate any reduction in energy usage, in fact it would be a huge increase if all phones only met the minimum required in this regulation.

I will wager that the cost of compliance will slightly increase, however. This is a benefit to established manufacturers as their cost per device for compliance is low, and they already have mechanisms to ensure compliance and testing, and relationships with regulators. It's a nontrivial increase in the already significant barrier to entry to everyone else, even if their devices easily comply.

Cell phones and other mobile devices already compete on energy efficiency being one of the primary factors driving purchasing decisions (in fact it's more potent competition than that, since it's battery life). There is no meaningful initial price/efficiency tradeoff like some other products, such as mini splits or other HVAC where people might be 'cheap' up front but then it costs them more over time due to less efficiency, in fact the more efficient a phone is the cheaper it can be to manufacture because you can install a smaller battery. This compounds the benefit of being efficient. Based just on my own intuition, I would predict that the anti-competitive barriers to entry this sets up will lead to a slight reduction in competition in the market, which will actually let manufacturers invest less in energy efficiency (and every other aspect of their phones) while maintaining their market share.

I predict that this regulation actually causes phones to become slightly less energy efficient than they would otherwise. Worse, if there were no regulation phones and other devices would likely become significantly more efficient than this regulation requires regardless, so the regulation just imposes a cost. Worse, there isn't a problem here to begin with, the energy usage of these devices does not show up in the data of total energy use unless you scroll all the way to the bottom, these devices are already using less power than a single LED light bulb turned on for 4 hours a day. If they just redirected the costs of compliance with this stupid regulation to something effective, such as adding to the subsidy on hyper-efficient mini split systems, it could save substantial amount of energy and push forwards electrification goals.