Turn off Your Video Game, Save a San Diego’s Worth of Energy
Which would you rather have: your Sony Playstation 3 or a year’s worth of electricity for the entire city of San Diego?
Silly question? You might not think so after reading the Natural Resources Defense Council’s new study, “Lowering the Cost of Play: Improving Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles.” Prepared with the help of Ecos Consulting, the report finds that energy inefficiencies and poor practices like not turning off games that aren’t in use are wasting huge amounts of energy and generating lots of greenhouse gases.
This is the first time anyone’s taken a hard and comprehensive look at the energy and carbon footprint of video games, and the findings might surprise you:
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With video games now in about 40 percent of U.S. households, game consoles are using about as much electricity each year as the city of San Diego: about 16 billion kilowatt-hours;
Some game consoles are much bigger energy hogs than others: left on constantly, the Nintendo Wii has an annual energy cost of about $10 (versus $3 when switched off during downtimes); the Sony Playstation 3, on the other hand, can set you back $160 each year (but only $15 if you remember to turn it off);
Better power management technologies and user behavior could reduce U.S. energy consumption by 11 billion kilowatt-hours a year, as well as save $1 billion-plus in energy costs and lower our carbon footprint by more than seven million tons.
The NRDC study concludes that video game-makers could adopt a lot of features to improve energy efficiency, but adds that gamers can make a meaningful contribution starting right now:
“The single most effective way to save energy is to power down your system — after saving your game if necesary — when not actively playing,” the NRDC’s fact sheet states.
Gamers of the world: power down now!
This is an issue that is finally starting to get some notice. We waste an unbelievable amount of energy in so many ways. It used to be just leaving the lights on in an empty room, but we’re now realizing that devices which are not even in use carelessly use kilowatts.
interesting article