Apple talks a lot about reducing its environmental impact, and one of the smaller iPhone features that genuinely caught my attention when it launched was Clean Energy Charging.
The idea is simple. Your iPhone can use forecasts showing when lower-carbon electricity is available on the local grid and, where possible, adjust when it charges to take advantage of cleaner energy. Your iPhone still makes sure it’s charged when you need it, and you can override the feature whenever you want.
There’s just one fairly major problem for those of us outside the United States: more than three years after Apple introduced it, we still can’t use it.
The Apple Post covered Clean Energy Charging when it launched with iOS 16.1 in 2022. At the time, its U.S.-only availability wasn’t particularly surprising. Apple frequently launches features in one market before expanding them elsewhere, especially when they rely on external data or local infrastructure.
What I find increasingly frustrating is that we’re now on iOS 27 and nothing has changed.
Apple’s own documentation still describes Clean Energy Charging as a U.S.-only feature. If you’re using an iPhone here in the UK, or practically anywhere else outside America, there’s no Clean Energy Charging toggle waiting to be switched on.
That feels like a missed opportunity.
Individually, changing when one iPhone charges isn’t going to transform the planet. But Apple has hundreds of millions of active iPhones around the world. A feature that quietly encourages devices to use electricity at cleaner times, without users having to think about it, is exactly the kind of environmental feature that becomes more meaningful at scale.
And that’s what makes the continued geographical restriction difficult to understand from a user’s perspective.
There will obviously be technical challenges. Clean Energy Charging depends on forecasts of carbon emissions from local electricity grids, and Apple would need reliable data for every market where it wants to offer the feature. Electricity infrastructure and the availability of that data also differ between countries.
But Apple isn’t a small company trying to build this capability for a handful of users.
This is a company that operates globally, sells the same iPhones across dozens of major markets and has made environmental responsibility a significant part of its corporate strategy. If there’s a feature built specifically to reduce the environmental impact of using an iPhone, I’d like to see Apple put more effort into making it genuinely global.
It also taps into a wider frustration I’ve had with Apple’s U.S.-only features.
Apple Card is probably the most obvious example. It launched in 2019 and, seven years later, it is still unavailable here in the UK and everywhere else outside the United States.
I wrote earlier this month about Apple Card’s continued lack of international expansion and why Apple’s move from Goldman Sachs to Chase could potentially create a better route to launching it elsewhere.
I understand why Apple Card is complicated. It’s a credit product. Apple needs banking partners, regulatory approval and potentially different terms for individual countries. What works in the U.S. can’t simply be copied and pasted into the UK or Europe.
That doesn’t make watching Apple add new Apple Card features from overseas any less frustrating, but at least there are obvious reasons why international expansion is difficult.
Clean Energy Charging feels different.
We’re talking about an iPhone software feature rather than a credit card. Yes, it depends on suitable local energy data, but after several years I’d have hoped Apple would have found a way to bring it to at least some additional countries.
The UK would seem like an obvious candidate. The electricity grid varies considerably in how carbon intensive it is at different times, meaning there is a genuine opportunity for devices to shift flexible electricity consumption toward cleaner periods.
I’d use Clean Energy Charging if Apple offered it here. I suspect plenty of other iPhone owners would too, particularly because it doesn’t require you to constantly monitor the grid yourself. The whole point is that the iPhone does the work in the background.
Not every Apple feature can launch everywhere simultaneously. Regulations, languages, infrastructure and third-party partnerships make that unrealistic.
But when a useful feature remains confined to one country years after launch, it’s reasonable to ask when the rest of Apple’s customers are going to get it.
With Clean Energy Charging, I’m still waiting.