this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Know before you buy: starting today, EUโ€™s new labels shake up the smartphone market (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 day ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
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[โ€“] wewbull@feddit.uk 72 points 1 day ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (7 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€“] carrylex@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours 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€“] diffusive@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours 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€“] BussyCat@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours 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€“] wewbull@feddit.uk 1 points 8 hours ago

Apologies. I meant GW other wise the maths doesn't work.

[โ€“] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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€“] wewbull@feddit.uk 2 points 21 hours ago

There's multiple levels to it:

Sure, the chip makers make halo performance chips, but that's because the phone makers are pushing them to make those chips for halo phones. The reason for that is that the public buy (or at least rent) halo phones.

Educating the public that there are reasons to buy more efficient phones should help shape the demand curve of the whole industry.

[โ€“] Redex68@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day 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€“] carrylex@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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

Does anyone have an idea how this helps with recycling?

[โ€“] wewbull@feddit.uk 4 points 23 hours ago

Designs which can be repaired can have specific parts taken out and recycled in isolation. If you can take the battery out easily you don't have all the materials from the rest of phone contaminating your recycling pipeline.

[โ€“] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Iโ€™m having trouble finding actual ratings for anything on this site