NRDC Rates Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles

An anonymous reader writes "Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features, we could save approximately 11 billion kWh of electricity per year, cut our nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of CO2 each year. In this November 2008 issue paper, NRDC provides recommendations for users, video game console manufacturers, component suppliers and the software companies that design games for improving the efficiency of video game consoles already in homes as well as future generations of machines yet to hit the shelves." The full report is freely downloadable as a PDF.

Comments

Re:Nintendo is Amazing (impressive at least)

[sexconker]

Man, you're a retard.

The point is that the Wii is a fucking 8 year-old GameCube with extras!

Re:Folding@Home- murdering the planet?

[DuBois]

Hey dude! Climate change is the new name for "global warming" because the climate is changing in the cooling direction. See woodfortrees.org and play with some of those charts to see what's really happening. If the Sun doesn't get out of its current slump, we're going to be facing a little ice age.

Aren't you really happy Al Gore got that one wrong? Especially since thousands more will die by freezing that would ever have been affected by the old name for Climate Change, "global warming."

Re:Nintendo is Amazing (impressive at least)

[brkello]

You may "win" the mod point war since every post that loves Nintendo gets modded up, but I think the point he was trying to make is that it isn't surprising or special that Nintendo consumes less power since it is running on last gen hardware with an innovative controller. It's like saying your $500 work PC draws less power than your $3000 gaming rig. Yeah, it's cheaper, it's still useful, but it isn't surprising since the hardware is inferior.

And standard Nintendo disclaimer: just because I say it has inferior hardware doesn't meant that it can't be just as fun if not more fun than the other consoles. It just has less processing and graphical power.