The iPhone 5 has a slightly bigger battery than the iPhone 4S, but it’s still not enough to break the bank to charge over the gadget’s lifetime: according to energy efficiency experts Opower, the iPhone 5 should only cost about forty-one cents per year to charge.

In the aggregate, though, that’s a lot of power: enough to power Cedar Rapids, Michigan Iowa.

Opower writes:

Even if we consider just the 170 million iPhone 5’s that are projected to be sold globally in the next year, their aggregate electricity requirements are nothing to sneeze at. The collective annual electricity consumption of the iPhone 5’s sold within 12 months will be equivalent to the annual electricity usage of 54,000 US households (roughly equivalent to the size of Cedar Rapids – the second largest city in Iowa). That’s just for one smartphone model over one year.

Even so, smartphones are actually extremely energy efficient gadgets in the grand scheme of things, costing much less in electricity than HDTVs, home consoles and PCs. Which makes sense: smartphones are optimized to run as efficiently as possible as a consequence of their form factor.

Editor’s Note: Whoops. Brain fart. Iowa, not Michigan.

Source: oPower

Via: Macrumors