A well-known energy hog of long standing
When the recent manufactured controversy over the Microsoft Xbox hit the papers, it resonated with me.
Probably 15 years ago, we bought a gaming console for our kids. (For the kids, of course, because we adults would never consider wasting time playing video games.)
We bought a Nintendo Wii. Not due to the quality of the gaming, but because the Wii console used about one-fifth the energy of the Xbox and similar alternatives. (Ask me what screen I finally got to on Wii Tanks.) The Wii had a lot of other interesting features — not the least of which was the Mii parade above. But the main reason I picked it was that it had a vastly lower carbon footprint than the alternatives at the time.
At the time, the characterization of Xbox energy use was that leaving an Xbox running was like leaving your fridge door wide open. It literally used as much power as the typical American fridge.
That does not appear to have changed in the past couple of decades. Exactly how much energy a gaming console uses depends on what you’re doing. But it’s clear that running a graphics-intensive game, on an Xbox, and using some modest-sized display, could easily consume 300 watts.
Here’s a site with a nice table showing typical ranges of energy consumption for home gaming consoles. In particular, they have a nice table for the PS4, showing that the difference between letting the machine run, unused, and putting it on standby, is about 85 watts. That matches my recollection for the Xbox.
And, doing just the tiniest bit of math, if you let that game console run at idle all the time (i.e., showing the menu), that will cost you about 750 KWH per year, compared to powering it down to standby mode. That 750 KWH is, in fact, more than the average U.S. fridge, per year.
The upshot is that, as I recalled, if you don’t enforce turning your Xbox off, but instead just leave it idling, the additional electricity cost is more than the cost of running a refrigerator.
What did Microsoft actually just do? Sleep versus Shutdown, or about 130 KWH per year in energy savings.
As is typical with modern news-righteousness, everybody seems to start yelling before you can get a clear picture of what just happened.
If you want a clear explanation, start here.
At issue is the difference between Sleep mode (with instant-on), and Shutdown mode (where it takes about 15 seconds for the Xbox to reboot). Just as with your laptop, one of those keeps everything in memory, keeps memory warm, and uses more power. The other one writes things off to storage, then more-or-less turns the machine off.
Sleep consumes perhaps 15 watts, while shutdown mode consumes just 0.5 watts. Which doesn’t sound like much, but for an Xbox continuously plugged in, the 15 watt Sleep mode consumes about 130 KWH per year more than the 0.5 watt Shutdown mode.
Just FYI, that’s enough electricity to power my wife’s Prius Prime for about 750 city miles of driving. At the prices I pay in Virginia, that’s about $15 worth of electricity per year.
In the past, Sleep was the default mode. But starting in March 2022, Microsoft change the default to Shutdown, rather than Sleep, for newly-manufactured units. So, to be clear, this new default has been in place for almost a year, on newly-purchased units.
The current controversy arose because Microsoft is updating the software on older Xbox units to make them match the standard that has been in place for about a year, for new units. That is, they are going to make Shutdown the default.
Users can override that if they wish.
In my experience, you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel until the barrel is empty.
I don’t know how the party of Teddy Roosevelt ended up being the pro-energy-consumption party. But that seems to characterize the Republican party today. Coal is good. Renewables are bad. Energy use is good. Energy conservation is bad.
At root, this is a controversy about a manufacturer choosing to make the software on older gaming consoles match the software that it has put on consoles manufactured for the past year. Mainly, this changed the default “off” setting from Sleep to Shutdown, which I calculate should save about 130 KWH per year per unit.
Near as I can tell, Microsoft updates the software on my computer any damn time it pleases. And I actually depend on the computer to get along in the real world. How on earth this update to gaming-console software became such a cause célèbre among the Right, I cannot even begin to fathom.
But, ultimately, I think it’s a good sign. If that’s the biggest thing they have to complain about, then things must be going pretty well.
