How the Xbox’s default “instant on” feature could harm the environment

NRDC: Default Series S/X option responsible for 3 million tons of CO2 by 2025.

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[Deputy Cartman]

Get a Kill-A-Watt or similar device and go around your house, apartment, hole in the ground, van down by the river, whatever and measure your devices' power draw and be amazed / horrified. My burr coffee grinder consumes 0.3 watts if the grounds receptacle is seated, which lights up a bright blue LED. 0 if it's not seated, thus no blue LED.

Times countless scores of people and countless devices designed like this... it adds up real quick!

 

[mknelson]

Get a Kill-A-Watt or similar device and go around your house, apartment, hole in the ground, van down by the river, whatever and measure your devices' power draw and be amazed / horrified. My burr coffee grinder consumes 0.3 watts if the grounds receptacle is seated, which lights up a bright blue LED. 0 if it's not seated, thus no blue LED.

Times countless scores of people and countless devices designed like this... it adds up real quick!

Yeah, it's funny the little things I do (like I always unplug my Braun shaver cleaner after it's done with the clean and charge) but I bet there are myriad things I don't think about!

 

[Null_Space]

The article conflates the S and the X. Do they really draw the same on idle?

 

[AdamM]

"Given those numbers, our hope is that most users would be willing to wait an extra 5 to 10 seconds for their console to restart if they knew the impact," Horowitz writes.

Yeah, that's fine, but it's not just about the extra 5 - 10 seconds. It's also about whatever maintenance the system has to do when it boots up. Game updates couldn't complete because the system was shut down.

It feels like we need a middle ground option here. A choice that allows the system to boot up periodically, check for updates and shut back down if there aren't any.

 

[bbf]

Boy, the NRDC's going to have a fit when they start looking at the computers with kilowatt power supplies with graphics cards that draw over 300W and CPUs that draw over 100W while gaming.



I agree with the NRDC though, to have the default power mode set to the lowest one on consumer gaming consoles just because average people won't know to switch it to low power mode and the fact that there are so many consoles in households.

BTW I'm one of those energy hogs that runs his Xbox One so that upgrades can happen in the background.

 

[Muon]

Reminds me of the old "energy vampire" posters. Standby power usage in gaming consoles (among other devices) has long been a concern for energy efficiency advocates.

 

[Chuckstar]

I’m all for an “all of the above” approach to minimizing energy waste in general, and carbon emissions more particularly, but keep in mind that annual carbon output is measured in the gigatonnes. So this is somewhere below a rounding error in the carbon problem.

 

[Paladin]

How could they draw that much power when streaming video? It's not doing software decode is it? They should have hardware decode for most common types of video codecs so power usage should be very low unless the system is doing other things at the same time.

 

[roypfoh]

Well, that’s a nice tangible way of tallying up consumption of electronics; in a very narrow and sensationalist headline.

Forrest for the trees. How about converting street lamps to LED first? Knocking off coal fired plants. And while we’re at it, let’s not sink server rads in the sea simply because it provides more energy “cost efficient” cooling for IT data centres.

https://home.uni-leipzig.de/energy/ener ... als/04.htm

58kWh is the human average. Per day!

There's no reason it has to be "this or that". Why do those things first when we can do them concurrently?

 

[claude.bing]

It feels like we need a middle ground option here. A choice that allows the system to boot up periodically, check for updates and shut back down if there aren't any.

Doesn't the XBox One already do that?

 

[Penguin Warlord]

Get a Kill-A-Watt or similar device and go around your house, apartment, hole in the ground, van down by the river, whatever and measure your devices' power draw and be amazed / horrified. My burr coffee grinder consumes 0.3 watts if the grounds receptacle is seated, which lights up a bright blue LED. 0 if it's not seated, thus no blue LED.

Times countless scores of people and countless devices designed like this... it adds up real quick!

It really doesn't add up that quick compared to other sources of power draw, and every single Kill-A-Watt device that you buy has a carbon footprint of its own.

At one point I did the calculations on specifying combination USB outlets for a new university building, as I had to choose between the kind that would be having some minor phantom power draw the entire time, vs the kind with a spring loaded cover that switches them on. The entire phantom power draw of all several hundred outlets worked out to being less than a single LED potlight, which on its own is orders of magnitude less than the power draw of any of the heaters in the building (or you know the impact of someone leaving a window open when they shouldn't). When I talked it over with our environmental team, they all agreed that given the additional moving parts and complexity of the spring loaded cover plates, it almost certainly would be, at best, a net wash from an environmental perspective once you accounted for the additional manufacturing carbon footprint, as well as the impact of replacing the moving parts when they inevitably break.

Yes, we need to reduce our energy consumption but stuff like this feels like they're wasting a lot of effort to not make much of a difference. If we were just talking about waiting a couple extra seconds to boot your console up to game that one be one thing, but that point is kind of disingenuous since the real benefit of instant on is not having to wait several hours for the new several GB game update to download. That's the difference between being able to spend a night gaming and not.

 

[dogwitch]

How could they draw that much power when streaming video? It's not doing software decode is it? They should have hardware decode for most common types of video codecs so power usage should be very low unless the system is doing other things at the same time.

up-scaling maybe?

 

[anon_coward]

Boy, the NRDC's going to have a fit when they start looking at the computers with kilowatt power supplies with graphics cards that draw over 300W and CPUs that draw over 100W while gaming.



I agree with the NRDC though, to have the default power mode set to the lowest one on consumer gaming consoles just because average people won't know to switch it to low power mode and the fact that there are so many consoles in households.

BTW I'm one of those energy hogs that runs his Xbox One so that upgrades can happen in the background.

not the point

people are claiming to love the environment and they choose to leave their electronics half on when unused just to save a few seconds on boot up. the electricity has to come from somewhere and a lot is still made by fossil fuels.

same with cars. CAFE could be up in the 40's or higher but people want fast acceleration and so the automakers tune their cars for power and not efficiency

 

[Jobra Commander]

The Xbox Series S/X initially drew 25 to 28W of "instant on" standby power at launch, but a recent firmware update caused a dramatic reduction, placing the new systems below the ~13W drawn by the Xbox One's "instant on" mode. The PlayStation 5, by contrast, uses between 1 and 2 watts when sitting idle in "rest mode."

You're comparing apples and oranges here. An instant on/install games when you're not using the xbox/get updates vs off. They both use ~1W when in "standby" or "rest".

Sony doesn't have this option, so why are they being compared side by side as if they are the same?

 

[Jedakiah]

Boy, the NRDC's going to have a fit when they start looking at the computers with kilowatt power supplies with graphics cards that draw over 300W and CPUs that draw over 100W while gaming.



I agree with the NRDC though, to have the default power mode set to the lowest one on consumer gaming consoles just because average people won't know to switch it to low power mode and the fact that there are so many consoles in households.

BTW I'm one of those energy hogs that runs his Xbox One so that upgrades can happen in the background.

In the winter, this guy *taps case* shaves a notable amount off my heating bill. In the summer, it makes me want to install an A/C.

 

[Deputy Cartman]

Get a Kill-A-Watt or similar device and go around your house, apartment, hole in the ground, van down by the river, whatever and measure your devices' power draw and be amazed / horrified. My burr coffee grinder consumes 0.3 watts if the grounds receptacle is seated, which lights up a bright blue LED. 0 if it's not seated, thus no blue LED.

Times countless scores of people and countless devices designed like this... it adds up real quick!

It really doesn't add up that quick compared to other sources of power draw, and every single Kill-A-Watt device that you buy has a carbon footprint of its own.

At one point I did the calculations on specifying combination USB outlets for a new university building, as I had to choose between the kind that would be having some minor phantom power draw the entire time, vs the kind with a spring loaded cover that switches them on. The entire phantom power draw of all several hundred outlets worked out to being less than a single LED potlight, which on its own is orders of magnitude less than the power draw of any of the heaters in the building.

Yes, we need to reduce our energy consumption but stuff like this feels like they're wasting a lot of effort to not make much of a difference. At the end of the day we're not talking about waiting a couple extra seconds to boot your console up to game, we're talking about waiting several hours for the new several GB game update to download.

I think you've missed the forest for the trees because I'm only talking about regular electric devices, be it video game consoles, electric shavers as someone mentioned, coffee grinders, etc. Once you get into heaters, is it powered by a boiler or is it electric, or maybe geothermal, and so on and so forth, that's rather broad. And pointing out to people with their own two eyes how their device sitting there "doing nothing" is actually consuming energy, and thus costing them money, has more "oomph" than pointing them to a Wikipedia page or something.

Furthermore, in large parts of the world, heaters are necessary so people don't freeze to death in the winter. Xboxes... not so much.

 

[DaveSimmons]

And I'm just looking into having my Xbox One on 24/7 to save power (and switch on time).

The reason - instead of having power to the other devices enabled by turning the TV out of standby - I'd use the Xbox to power the other devices.

Am I in a minority - sure, but these sorts of articles are annoyingly shallow.

The point is that the default should be OFF not ON, and turning it on should come after a page warning people that they will be using a significant amount of energy to save a few seconds.

Advanced users with specific needs like yours would still be able to go into settings and enable it, but changing the default to OFF might save 1 billion kWh a year.

Also consider states like California with power supply issues. Changing millions of Xboxen to stop using so much power would help with that.

Microsoft should fix this.

 

[Penguin Warlord]

Get a Kill-A-Watt or similar device and go around your house, apartment, hole in the ground, van down by the river, whatever and measure your devices' power draw and be amazed / horrified. My burr coffee grinder consumes 0.3 watts if the grounds receptacle is seated, which lights up a bright blue LED. 0 if it's not seated, thus no blue LED.

Times countless scores of people and countless devices designed like this... it adds up real quick!

It really doesn't add up that quick compared to other sources of power draw, and every single Kill-A-Watt device that you buy has a carbon footprint of its own.

At one point I did the calculations on specifying combination USB outlets for a new university building, as I had to choose between the kind that would be having some minor phantom power draw the entire time, vs the kind with a spring loaded cover that switches them on. The entire phantom power draw of all several hundred outlets worked out to being less than a single LED potlight, which on its own is orders of magnitude less than the power draw of any of the heaters in the building.

Yes, we need to reduce our energy consumption but stuff like this feels like they're wasting a lot of effort to not make much of a difference. At the end of the day we're not talking about waiting a couple extra seconds to boot your console up to game, we're talking about waiting several hours for the new several GB game update to download.

I think you've missed the forest for the trees because I'm only talking about regular electric devices, be it video game consoles, electric shavers as someone mentioned, coffee grinders, etc. Once you get into heaters, is it powered by a boiler or is it electric, or maybe geothermal, and so on and so forth, that's rather broad. And pointing out to people with their own two eyes how their device sitting there "doing nothing" is actually consuming energy, and thus costing them money, has more "oomph" than pointing them to a Wikipedia page or something.

Furthermore, in large parts of the world, heaters are necessary so people don't freeze to death in the winter. Xboxes... not so much.

I'm not missing the forest for the trees, it's just that every single thing is a tradeoff and you should be maximizing the carbon benefit for the amount of effort / sacrifice you're willing to put in. Buy a housecoat and turn your thermostat down a degree and you will make an order of magnitude bigger difference you'll probably barely notice. But ask someone if they're willing to pay $5 in electricity a year to never have to miss a night of gaming due to a system or game update and I guarantee you that every single one will pay it.

And you do realize that in those parts of the world, most of that energy consumption that the Xbox is using is still being outputted into your house as heat right? i.e. it's just making your heaters have to work less. If you have a natural gas heated house it might actually be improving your carbon footprint in the winter.

 

[GFKBill]

Will it actually cause "more" carbon given that most of them will be a replacement for a now-disused previous-gen xbox?

Not that I disagree about defaulting to lower power option, but that claim is questionable if you don't deduct the old ones.

EDIT: Heck the article even states that it will be 9W vs 13W so it's actually an improvement. No new power plants need be built then, that's a relief

 

[Rbrian]

When I had a PS3, I left it on all day - but it was doing useful work, running Folding@home. That got me into BOINC on my PC, which is running 10 hours a day, using all of my 6700K and 980Ti, mostly on World Community Grid. It's powered partly by my solar panels, the rest comes from the grid, which is pretty clean in Scotland, and getting cleaner.

I'd like an Xbox Series X, but I think power consumption will be lower than assumed, since they're still impossible to buy.

 

[nivedita]

To put that 78 kWH into perspective, the average US household consumes a little over 10 MWH per year.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

 

[AdamM]

"Given those numbers, our hope is that most users would be willing to wait an extra 5 to 10 seconds for their console to restart if they knew the impact," Horowitz writes.

Yeah, that's fine, but it's not just about the extra 5 - 10 seconds. It's also about whatever maintenance the system has to do when it boots up. Game updates couldn't complete because the system was shut down.

It feels like we need a middle ground option here. A choice that allows the system to boot up periodically, check for updates and shut back down if there aren't any.

I really want to scream at people who go this "but my convenience" whine.

Jesus fucking Christ, is your life so full you can't wait a few minutes for an update? How about not having the fucking thing wake up every now and then and just check for the fucking update at start up, and download it while you're gaming, then install it when you're done for the night?

You know, like a fucking computer does.

Jesus what a fucking waste of electricity to have that functionality built into a fucking entertainment device. It's not like a few minutes before you start playing is going to be wasted. I turn on my computer, to shave and what not then come back and sign in. You can turn on your device, go grab the pizza and Code Red Mountain Dew, then sit down and be all set to play.

I mean, seriously, having the damned thing start up and turn off by itself is bullshit, and keeping it "on" for that kind of nonsense is even more egregious bullshit.

Actually yeah, my life is that full. I often spend 12 - 16 hour days at work and I work 5 days a week. The time I'm not spending at home using electricity more than makes up for the relatively minuscule consumption of instant on.

So the last thing I want when I get time off is to wait an hour for an update because Sony and Microsoft don't come close to saturating my 400 Mbps internet connection.

 

[SailingSailing]

This is something that building managers responsible for apartments, university residences, etc. have been aware of a long time. "Plug load" - the average power consumption of a unit, whether the occupant is there or not, just keeps climbing. Everything is "always on".

More awareness of the problem is a good thing. And, re the convenience argument, systems like my TV/cable/whatever actually take longer to start up than the old dumb system did, but it does so much more I'm willing to put up with this ...

And I'm as guilty as anyone. I "forget" to turn off a lot of things that I might need later in the day, because it will save rebooting.

Did I mention that more awareness is a good thing?

 

[AdamWill]

Well, that’s a nice tangible way of tallying up consumption of electronics; in a very narrow and sensationalist headline.

Forrest for the trees. How about converting street lamps to LED first? Knocking off coal fired plants. And while we’re at it, let’s not sink server rads in the sea simply because it provides more energy “cost efficient” cooling for IT data centres.

https://home.uni-leipzig.de/energy/ener ... als/04.htm

58kWh is the human average. Per day!

By Jove, I think you're onto something. Indeed, by some weird quirk, Microsoft's gaming division *is* responsible for both the Xbox consoles *and* the world's streetlights, and thus needs to decide which to fix first! Strange world...

 

[Granadico]

My utility company sent us free power saving stuff for being within the income range and they're great for stuff like this. They gave us a power stuff with an IR sensor that you put by the TV's IR sensor, and the kill switch is on until you try to turn the TV on with the IR. I'm sure it helps prevent a lot of phantom drain from the various consoles, Blu Ray players, etc. plugged in. Only takes an extra second or two to turn everything on as well.

 

[hecksagon]

The article conflates the S and the X. Do they really draw the same on idle?

Probably pretty close. Most of the components on the PCB are going to be the same or similar, and in a standby state you are going to have basically the same components active.

 

[J.C. Helios]

This reminds me that I've wondered what the electrical consumption figure is for smartphone wireless charging. That's less efficient than wired, right?

 

[Meathim]

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that 5% of the world energy go to stuff on standby. A paper (link below) suggest 2%, but that paper is from the year 2000, so 5% sounds more on the money. Which is pretty terrible.

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings ... aper08.pdf

EDIT: I haven't read the entire paper as of this posting btw.

 

[Stochastic]

"Given those numbers, our hope is that most users would be willing to wait an extra 5 to 10 seconds for their console to restart if they knew the impact," Horowitz writes.

Yeah, that's fine, but it's not just about the extra 5 - 10 seconds. It's also about whatever maintenance the system has to do when it boots up. Game updates couldn't complete because the system was shut down.

It feels like we need a middle ground option here. A choice that allows the system to boot up periodically, check for updates and shut back down if there aren't any.

Devices like computers tend to use /the most/ power when booting up. Boot up with any frequency and you loose all benefits of being off in the first place.

Citation needed. I could be wrong, but I find that to be implausible with modern computers that can rapidly switch power states within milliseconds.

 

[bjf182]

Cryptocurrency says 'hold my beer' . . .

 

[axodox]

"We have repeatedly urged Sony and Microsoft to include a dedicated low-power chip for video playback in their consoles, and this request is even more important today given the potential for long hours of 'binge watching' via the console,"

Me: watching youtube videos on my gaming PC connected to a large TV...
But I always turn it off when not in use, I also disabled instant on immediately when I have noticed how hot the console become when not in use.

 

[NoMorePosting]

And I'm just looking into having my Xbox One on 24/7 to save power (and switch on time).

The reason - instead of having power to the other devices enabled by turning the TV out of standby - I'd use the Xbox to power the other devices.

Am I in a minority - sure, but these sorts of articles are annoyingly shallow.

The point is that the default should be OFF not ON, and turning it on should come after a page warning people that they will be using a significant amount of energy to save a few seconds.

Advanced users with specific needs like yours would still be able to go into settings and enable it, but changing the default to OFF might save 1 billion kWh a year.

Also consider states like California with power supply issues. Changing millions of Xboxen to stop using so much power would help with that.

Microsoft should fix this.

My point was the real power equation depends on the power consumption in standby and out of all the devices.

Ignored in the article is the mandatory T.V. that the Xbox is connected to, plus a Soundbar or HiFi unit etc, and don't forget the Chromecast, Apple TV and/or Roku.

Any of these could use more power than the Xbox on standby. Then there are the privacy issues - which box to you trust THIS WEEK to be on 24/7.
Which box needs updates most - size/frequency

So yes, the article is shallow.

My decision was to have the Xbox when brought out of standby power on the other units, rather than the T.V. Also as the Xbox has clients for Netflix, Prime etc - disconnecting the network connection from the TV (that I don't trust) and now trying to set the Xbox up to control power and volume.