Distressing News for Gamers

Some distressing news for those of us who thought video games were fairly eco-friendly. Rather than driving or flying a jet somewhere, I had assumed that sitting in the dark playing video games was pretty good for the environment. Wrong.

A new study shows that some of the most popular game consoles today are huge energy suckers.

The worst offenders are Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. In the first ever comprehensive survey of the consumption used by video games, the Natural Resources Defence Council in the U.S. came up with some pretty startling figures.

Combined, the electricity use of video games is enough to power the American city of San Diego for a full year. But most disturbing is the amount of power that is being consumed just because these consoles are being left on. The calculation is four out of every ten American households have at least one game console and the influential NRDC estimates that half of all gamers keep their consoles on all the time. Leaving the console on 24/7 eats up as much power as running two refrigerators year-round.

NRDC Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz, the author of the new study, said turning off the consoles can result in significant savings. With so many struggling in today’s economy, it’s important to realise there are simple steps games can take to lower their energy costs.

Of the big three in video game consoles, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii, the amount of electricity consumed varies greatly. Given the amount of graphics used, it makes sense that the PS3 and Xbox are the biggest consumers, using 150 Watts and 119 Watts respectively per hour. The Wii, on the other hand, uses a comparatively paltry 16 Watts per hour. Just two years ago, the PS3 and Xbox used even more power but newer versions of the consoles have improved their energy consumption.

More can be done, however. The NRDC calculated that in the U.S. alone, consumers could save $1 billion a year on utility costs and reduce as much CO2 emissions per year as all the cars in the tech-heavy city of San Jose emit annually, or about 7 million tons.

Using the game consoles as high-definition video players are particularly high energy uses. The PS3 uses five times the power of Sony’s Blu-ray player to operate the same DVD. This makes no sense especially since Sony produces both devices.

Both the Xbox and PS3 have automatic power-down features which shut off the devices if they’re left idle. But for some silly reason, the feature is disabled by default on the consoles. The NRDC has a link to how to set up the power-setting default. Click here for the link.

So go ahead and set that up now. Go on. We’ll wait here.

Via NRDC