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Nov 28, 2008 07:00 AM | 51
If you're planning this holiday season (perhaps even today) to become one of the tens of millions of people in the U.S. to buy a video game system, you may want to consider how the purchase of a Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox will impact your carbon footprint (or, at very least, your electric bill).
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a New York-based environmental organization, in a new report says that video game systems are huge energy wasters, mostly because people (read: kids) tend to leave them on even when they're not using them.
The study, conducted with Portland, Ore., environmental research and consulting firm Ecos Consulting, found that game consoles (40 percent of U.S. homes have at least one) consume an estimated 16 billion kilowatt hours per year—roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. This energy usage isn't going to drop anytime soon: Between 2002 and 2007 more than 62 million video game consoles were sold in the U.S. (Wii was the No. 1 seller, followed by PlayStation and the Xbox). The Washington Post reports that the National Institute on Media and the Family found that 92 percent of kids, ages two to 17, play video games regularly.
Sony PlayStation 3 (which uses 150 Watts of energy) and Microsoft Xbox 360 (which uses 119 Watts) are the biggest offenders, while the Nintendo Wii draws less than 20 Watts, according to the NRDC report. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 each if left on all the time, consume more than 1,000 kilowatt-hours each year—equal to the annual energy use of two new refrigerators. The PlayStation 3, which can also be used as a high-definition video player, uses five times the power of a stand-alone Sony Blu-ray player to show the same movie.
Ecos and the NRDC offer some solutions, calling for video game console makers to develop more energy-efficient devices that use many of the same power-saving features found on PCs (such as the automatic powering down of a system if it is left idle for a certain period of time). After a period of one to three hours of inactivity, for example, the video game console could automatically save the status of the game to memory and initiate auto power-down. Or, the consoles could come with a "sleep" button that could be used to save power when the players are away from their games. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have power-saving features, but they are turned off by default when the consoles are shipped and most people don't even know they exist.
Such power-saving features could save approximately 11 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, cut the nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of carbon dioxide each year—an amount equal to the global warming pollution from all the cars on the road in San Jose, Calif., according to the report.
(Image courtesy of iStockphoto; Copyright: Skip ODonnell)
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51 Comments
Add Commenthmm just how much enery did we waste trying to figure out the obvious, why not invest our research resources more wisely, and work on alternative energy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBREAKING: Scientists discover that electronic devices, when left on, actually use electricity!!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis has to be one of the most trite "counter global warming" suggestions I've ever read. What about the emissions saved by having an at-home enterntainment alternative to the mall cine-plex? If the game machines are being left on, then obviously the electric-bill-paying parents simply aren't recognizing a financial incentive to turn them off!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I was reading this article was thinking 'what a hack job this is.' Fortunately, I felt better after reading the 3 comments that had accumulated up to that time. Much more sensible. Yes, there is a problem here that could use some solutions. But we need balance from SciAm, not scare tactics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGames don't waste energy, people do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUmm...this might just be me, but why is a scientific article mentioning something like "150 Watts of energy"? If I had written that in one of my physics exams, it would definitely have been a mark off, so why is this magazine, read by physicists, engineers, and scientists the world over doing it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow is this any different from leaving your TV of computer on for hours? This is just another attempt by people who think video games are a waste of time to try to shut down the gaming community. They couldn't do it with "Video games cause violence and/or obesity" so now they're trying the Green approach.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell while we are attacking games, why not loot at the carbon footprint of professional sports...I have no actual data, but I'd wager American football alone "wastes" more resources annually than gaming platforms.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a hard nosed conservative who has built a remote energy home (solar and wind ) that supplies all my power needs I don't want to hear from so called environmentalists who still suck on the big teat of carbon based energy sources. If you aren't going to walk the walk lets not talk the talk. And though as a scientist I believe in natural climate change following mirco and macro cycles I haven't seen any real world data indicating that man has any but a minute influence on climate change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1000 watts =1 kilowatt "and Microsoft Xbox 360 (which uses 119 Watts)" lets say that's per hour that converts to .119 kilowatts right? .119kw x 4 hours a day =0.476kw a day , 0.476kw x 365days in a year = 173.74kw a year where do you get a thousand kw a year? ok how about 8 hours a day ? 347.48 no... 16 hours a day? 694.96 no.... 24 hours a day? 1042.44 ok there it is so If I leave my 360 on for 24 hours a day 365 days a year then I use 1042.44 watts of energy that's where they got that figure and if I average the 3 not taking into account the the wii sold the most units we get 849.72kw a year running for 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Tell me who honestly leaves their console on 24 hours a day?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHats off the the hard-nosed, self-reliant conservative. I also have a more traditional religion than global warming. However, video games are a waste of time! You accomplish NOTHING while sitting still in front of a box. The country would be a LOT closer to energy self sufficiency if the adolescent boys got off their asses and were experimenting with home energy like they used to soop up cars. And that's the benign part. Don't you realize your thoughts are being patterned and your reactions programmed in these virtual realities, whose overall paradigm is generally not Western?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLitroenergy Power Cells may soon be incorporated into gaming machines so they use no outside power source. Litroenergy Power Cells may also be used to supply power to the electric car, no need to plug one in. The power is generated from self-luminecent micro particles (NASA Tech Brief's Grand Prize Winner) when placed or sandwiched between solar cells.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo don't give up on your gaming yet, there is a solution around the corner.
Sincerely,
Steve Stark
NASA Tech Brief's Grand Prize Winner (2007)
Warning: Breathing out carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWARNING: Breathing out carbon dioxide contributes to global warming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=881376822
test
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is typical of sciam. I've been disgusted by many articles before, but this one is the straw that broke the camel's back. Sciam is FAR more concerned with politics than science, and a good portion of the science articles are mystical in nature, if not deterministic like being born republican or democrat for crying out loud. I'm through with this site.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDefinitions:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeveloper - A person who wants to build houses around a pristine lake.
Environmentalist - Someone who already has his lake house.
Definitions:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDeveloper - Someone who want to build houses around a pristine lake.
Environmentalists - Someone who already has a lake house.
Good comments I was also wondering how many of us used our Xbox 360s 24/7 and some of those (games) esp wii have educational uses. They also promote true interests in science of numbers and graphics. Which may cause some to go into true science not the drivel I just read in the once truly scientific journal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat Comments from the blogger s here I used to consider Scientific American a great journal of intelligence. Now it seems like a arm of an ideology not based on anything more than junk science. I like my daughter playing some games as they inspire her math and curiosity about the programing language used to create all the effects in said games and 24/7?? really?? I think the author of this articles computer runs more than those consoles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmericans place a high value on convenience, especially when the dollar cost is hidden. Ignore global warming, forget about carbon footprint, it's money that matters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLos Angeles Gamers
Get a FREE game of your choice for your XBOX!!!
Just turn off your XBOX from noon until 6PM everyday.
.119 KwHr X 6 hours X 365 days X $0.25/KwHr = $65.15 per year saved
A new game or accessory:
or a really cheap babysitter.
I am registering for the first time despite being a reader of SCIAM for over 15 years including print just so I can comment on this incredibly ludicrous article. Good job SCIAM, you have really sunk to a new low using politics and junk science to attack video games.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are you stopping there? Think of all the global warming this article has caused from people sitting online using electricity reading such dribble on sciam?! In fact, reading ANYTHING online is causing global warming... we better go back to newspapers and magazines as a venue to distribute such crap such as this article, oh wait, that causes global warming, too. What DOESN'T cause global warming?! What are we going to do?! We are doomed.
Meanwhile the earth's temps have actually flat lined since 1998 and have even possibly started a bit of cooling. Oh, but now it is "climate change"... got to cover all bases, after all.
Sure there has been global warming, but man-made? The jury is still out, despite the science communities' "consensus". Imagine how guilty these scientists would feel if they had been alive during the end of the last Ice Age... talk about global warming on a massive scale! How could they contain the guilt they would feel from that "Man made" (or so they would be convinced) event?!
But video games will be the end of us all! Wow... just wow.
Actually I want to temper my above comment just a tad, but not too much. I understand that you are more upset about the fact that the systems are left on more often then other entertainment boxes of various sorts. I am all for saving electricity, and it WOULD be nice to have an option to go into some sort of sleep mode if you forget to power down.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever your title blames THE GAMES, and by extension that playing them is the cause of the large carbon footprint, not the console, where the blame squarely lies. Disingenuous to say the least. Although I would argue the issue is with the PEOPLE who don't turn off the console, rather than the console itself. I mean who leaves their xbox on 365 days a year 24 hours a day in order to equal a years worth of refrigerator use?!
That said, the PS3 actually contributes quite a bit to science through Folding at Home that uses its substantial CPU power to fold proteins while it is not being used, which makes leaving the console on 24/7 more than worth it. Not to mention, the PS3, despite using a bit more power (NOT 5 times more while playing... use a Kill-o-Watt meter if you don't believe me) than some other blu-ray players actually has some benefit as well. It is FAST. It loads the movies fast, it navigates fast, etc. thanks to its extra horsepower under the hood.
Forget the video games. Clearly the quality of readership has diminished over the last 50 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all, your facts are wrong. The wii is the fastest selling console RIGHT NOW, but to date, more Xbox 360s have been sold than playstation or wii. Not that it really matters, but it just makes your article less believable. However, the believability is irrelevant. What kind of idiocy is it to tell people "don't buy a video game console because they use energy if left on!!". Hello so-called scientists, Americans ROUTINELY leave their televisions on for hours on end, even when they are not watching them. Are you going to come out with an article about not buying televisions too? No, because they're more socially acceptable. And what about the millions of metric tons of auto emissions that are saved by adult gamers who hang out at home gaming rather than going on pointless drives to nowhere in their gas guzzling cars. Gaming can save plenty of money, as well as REDUCE your carbon footprint, if done right. The title of this article is a mockery of what I thought scientific american stood for, and SMACKS of a biased agenda worth nil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and I appreciate the number crunching that an above poster worked out. I have never heard of a 360 capable of running 24/7/365 without suffering the red ring of death, so the idea that your average gamer is wasting a thousand kwh a year, further evidence of this sites bias and so-called science that isn't science at all, but speculation and agenda-furthering.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that the sensationalism really hurts the cause. It's part of the original report and not created by SciAm (though not toned down, either). Chapter 2 in the report does have interesting information, and I agree that better power management in consoles would help. It looks like the high end consoles, unlike PC's, don't have a real "idle" mode, that takes considerably less power. Indeed, I wouldn't expect movie playback on a console to take as much power as playing a game.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it's a good point, and that console makers should consider adding some power management. Also, if more games allowed saving at any place and time, gamers wouldn't need to keep the console on in order to continue to play later.
Just keep the sensationalism down. It turns people off.
Dracarys: check your math.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is there so much resistance to this? Are all these commentors either industry hacks or just so completely engrossed in their game worlds that, like alcoholics, they'll use any excuse to deny culpability, including denying that humans have a noticeable impact on the climate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree. Many of the previous posts are bratty. What's wrong with Sci Am informing readers of a report? Merely covering it does not make the site biased. Are you people ostriches or reasonable human beings willing to have your consciousness raised? I can't understand such reluctance to turn of a game when it's not in use.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(yawn) People are going to do what they want, until it kills them, and both sides will continue to ridicule each other until all life is extinguished.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd rightly, the world will not miss us when we're gone. Friggin morons.
Look at the title: "Black Friday warning: video games waste energy and contribute to global warming".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDisingenuous to say the least, and certainly biased. This has NOTHING to do with video games, and everything to do with how the consoles are designed.
It isn't about reluctance to turn off a device either. I don't know anyone who leaves their consoles on 24/7 or even AT ALL when they are not in use, other than the PS3 which does Folding at Home. Their premise is outlandish.
I'm all for recycling, caring for the environment, saving energy etc. But one thing I am NOT convinced about (yet) is that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. There is just too little evidence at this time. Climate is very, very hard to understand, and has many driving variables that we just do not fully understand yet. What causes ice ages, or the end of ice ages? We still don't know. Orbit perturbations, sunspots/solar activity/ocean current changes/CO2? Who knows, we are still trying to figure it all out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat amazes me is the number of people that automatically think that anyone that does not buy into the whole "human driven global warming" idea is obviously ignorant, or stupid etc.
Saying that Global Warming is not for sure caused by humans is not equivalent to saying Evolution is false, people! Science does not progress by "consensus". The "consensus" used to be that the sun revolved around the Earth!
There is nothing wrong with being a skeptic in science, in fact that is what it is all about when it comes to theories like Global Warming. We just do not know enough about to put it on a pedestal up there with Evolution or Relativity.
~100-150 solid years of recorded temperature records (some would even debate how good those records really are), some tree rings, and ice core samples, does NOT a solid understanding of climate make. No one is disputing that there has been warming in the last 100 years. But that does not mean it is caused by humans. Think of the scale of the warming at the end of the last Ice Age. There is no doubt that if our civilization was around during that time that we would be convinced we were the cause, and nothing could be farther from the truth.
Earth is billions of years old, and climate has not spiraled out of control into runaway cooling/heating despite massive volcanic activity, meteor impacts, and continental drift etc. The Earth is highly resilient when it comes to climate and has many ways to balance.
CO2 was many times higher in the past, and temps were higher, too. But was CO2 the cause or the effect? We really don't know. In my eyes it was more likely hotter because the continents were all one giant landmass instead of separated by oceans as they are today. And when temps get hotter, CO2 goes up. In my eyes, it is the oceans and landmass configurations that drive climate, and CO2 is just along for the ride. Since the breakup of the super-continent, the tendency for climate has actually been long ice ages interspersed with short warm periods.
THEN SO DOES VIEWING THIS ARTICLE, OR DOING ONLINE BANKING OR ANYTHING WITH OUR COMPUTERS. JUST IMAGINE ALL THE ENERGY WASTED WRITING THIS ARTICLE ALONE.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI enjoy these 'studies' conducted on the back of an envelope with questionable assumptions. Let's assume every console sold in the previous 6 years is left running 6 hours of every day of the year -- that will get us to 16 billion KWH/year. Gotta go now. Guess I should turn off the hair drier since I'm not using it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGee, leaving electronics on wastes electricity. We didn't need a study in order to figure that out. I won't even mention the politically correct, anti-video game bias of this article. How about skipping nonsense like this "story" and instead reporting on some actual science?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaha
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI dropped my subscription to SA after 47 years. It's not a science magazine anymore; it's a political magazine with a science veneer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVideo games use energy in the best way possible: making our young people smarter and more coordinated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIm favoriting this article so that i can laugh at how rediculous it is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree, rather than telling people about the horrible amount of energy that is being wasted by video game consoles they should tell people how to save energy. Any half intelligent person knows that leaving any appliance on for a long period of time will cause it to use large amounts of energy. Come on Sci Am, you tell us about how we are polluting the air and then you tell us that video games are wasting energy. What do you want parents to do with their children?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe more things change the more they stay the same. I yelled constantly at my kids when they left a room to TURN OUT THAT LIGHT! Now the new generation have to yell: TURN OFF THAT GAME!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBtw; sounds like the cranky posters felt your article was way too similar to the lecture they used to get from their mothers to TURN OUT THAT LIGHT!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLOL!
well, it's not that it's on, maybe that the consoles are left in standby
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe we could figure out a way to get some of that wasted money to the companies that need to innovate the solutions to this big waste of energy. Imagine those dollars spent on that wasted energy going to research and development to create the game system that uses less energy. Maybe electronics makers should get bonuses for producing items that use less energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistyping this into a computer is wasting energy and adding to the destruction of the world..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just received the reprint "energy's future" and was verry pleased to find the date of each article. in the past, the cronology of the articles went a long way toward placing them in the stream of advancing technology. I particularly noted the touting of Enron on the last page.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll forms of conservation of energy are needed so we don't have to build more coal or nuke plants. Take the load off the grid. Weather it is the T.V. a light or anything that is not doing work shut it off when you are not using it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo many of you are complaining that typing this article was wasting energy, if thats true, then commenting about this is also a waste. I do agree that this article is utter BS. I always turn of my XBox when I'm not using it, and if I intend to leave it inactive, I let it be so for only around a half hour. Plus, most of the time it sits in the cabinet below my TV collecting dust! This article does more to complain than to discuss alternatives or a way to fix the "problem" and as many of you stated, the consoles cannot take the strain of being left on for long periods (Granted, I have left my GameCube on for 12 hours straight.). Besides, if you powered your home with solar enery or windmills, you wouldn't give a rat's rear about the time your console is left on. Who knew that a device left on used energy?!?! Besides, on the issue of non-exhistant "Global Warming" you can't point your finger at one thing and say that its the cause. If you want to fix a global problem, use a global solution that covers all types of energy consumption.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is really?game will lost energy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI dont think so
Eric
http://www.1gameconsole.com
http://1gameconsole.blogspot.com
Maybe if people would plant more trees and stop destroying the rain forest there would be some place for the CO2 to go.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this