Lowering the Cost of Play

In my living room sits a 32" LCD HDTV. I feel guilty every time I turn it on because I know how much energy the thing uses. Every night I turn it off, and not just stand-by, but OFF. It's the only device in my entertainment center that I turn off every night because it is the largest amongst the usual suspects identified as vampire devices.

At bedtime, when I turn the lights off, my entertainment center looks like something from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At the very heart of all of those little LEDs are my gaming consoles. With a 7-month-old baby my time logged gaming is no longer measured in consecutive hours, but in 10 or 15-minute chunks. That means I don't have time to waste waiting for my consoles to boot, and then load a saved game. So I do what nearly half of all gamers do, I leave the console turned on. What I didn't know until today is that collectively gamers are logging 16 billion kilowatt hours per year. For a single gamer like me, that means that my console is burning more energy than my refrigerator - in fact, chances are it's using twice as much. And that TV I feel so guilty about? My console uses 2-3 times more energy.

In a new report called Lowering the Cost of Play NRDC outlines how I, and gamers everywhere, can change the way we use our consoles to save a little cash and 7 million tons of CO2 emissions every year.  For a little perspective 7 million tons of CO2 emissions is about the same as the electricity use of 841,000 homes a year. The good news is that the steps are simple, and we can take them now.

The holidays are upon us, and that brings lots of extra time, and a host of new games. Before settling in for a marathon session with Fallout 3, take a few minutes to tweak your console, because being able to destroy your environment in a game shouldn't mean you have to destroy THE Environment in meatspace.