sony - The Environment Report

Follow the 'turn it off' advice and save, on average, $75 a year. (Source: Julo at Wikimedia Commons)

The average personal computer is a real energy guzzler. Only about half of the power it
uses makes videogames run, or music play, or run office software. The other half goes
up in wasted heat. Shawn Allee found out there are energy-saving PCs, but maybe using
the computer correctly can save the most power and money:

Transcript

I want a peek at some energy-saving PCs, so I head to a Best Buy electronics store.

“We’re heading to the computers.”

“Yes.”

I’m with a store manager. He wants me to use his first name, Tim.

Shawn: “When people come to the store, what’s usually the thing they’re asking
about or looking for in their PC?”

Tim: “First thing they look for is memory and hard drive space, that’s pretty much
it, and price.”

Shawn: “So it’s like, what can this thing do, and how much is this gonna cost me?”

Tim: “Exactly.”

Shawn: “How often is it the case someone comes in and says, Tim, which one saves
the most energy?”

Tim: “I have never heard that question asked.”

Shawn: “How long you been doing this?”

Tim: “I’ve been with Best Buy for five years.”

And you know, when I ask shoppers about energy consumption and computers, I just get
blank stares.

Well, Tim’s got several computers that have thumb-sized Energy Star labels.

Energy Star rated computers cut energy use by a third, and they usually cost the same as
comparable models.

This can save an average user maybe $25 a year in energy costs.

There are people who say that’s not enough.

You can actually save three times that by using PCs right.

One guy making this case is Pat Tiernan. He directs the Climate Savers Computing
Initiative, a computer industry group.

Tiernan says no matter how you get a PC – new or hand-me down …

“Make sure power management settings are aggressively set.”

Those are in the computer’s control panel settings.

Tiernan wants people to give power-settings the once-over, just to make certain the
computer can detect when you’re not using it.

“It puts it into a lower energy state like sleep mode.”

That’s if you don’t use the computer for fifteen minutes.

That’s the biggest energy saver.

Tiernan’s next tip is to simply turn off the machine when you’re not using it.

“It’s funny to me, people don’t just leave their cars on when they’re done with them,
right? They don’t leave them running in the garage or on the street. Yet, most
people in the U.S. leave their devices on in one form or another.”

Now, Tiernan says, there’s turning off a machine and there’s really turning off a machine.

“Even though you’ve turned many devices off on your household doesn’t mean
they’re not using power.”

Tiernan says computers always sip a little electricity out of your wall socket.

Printers, computer speakers and monitors can, too.

“Put your devices on a power strip. Flip that switch off and you’ll be doing yourself
and the environment a benefit.”

Now, there are critics of turning off your PC.

Shawn: “I have heard in the past that turning your desktop on and off again is hard
on your hard drive, though.”

Tiernan: “Well, a hard drive is and spinning up and spinning down throughout its
entire use. Does it put added wear on your hard drive? It really depends. Depending
on what you have loaded on it, your disk may be spinning up and down anyway, so
there’s a good argument to be made that turning it shutting it down for 8 hours that
you sleep may be better.”

So, what’s the bottom line if you follow Tiernan’s ‘turn it off’ advice for your PC?

On average, you could save $75 a year.

You can save even more if you use an Energy Star model.

But Tiernan says cutting power doesn’t just help your bottom line.

He says there’re more than a billion PCs on the market.

Cutting their power use can take a bite out of climate change.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Transcript

Video games are a quick escape into an alternate reality… (snd up) fortunately with multiple lives.

(snd of gunfire)

There’s a war going on in this basement.

Taurus and his partner Walt are using their M-16s, grenades, and knives to fight off the enemy.

(snd)

In real life – Taurus is Will Frey.

He’s a sophomore at Michigan State University.

And he’s been working really hard on his overall ranking:

“So I am currently seven hundred and eleven thousandth”

That sounds really bad.

But actually it’s really good.

He’s better than more than 5 million other people playing Call of Duty 4 on their Xbox consoles.

It’s estimated that forty percent of U-S Households have a video game.

And that number is growing.

The games are played for hours and hours – but they’re also left on – even if nobody’s playing them:

“A lot of sports games – you can’t save in the middle of a game – and the games are like usually a half an hour, so if you’re like twenty minutes and you have to leave, you don’t want to lose that twenty minutes kind of thing you know.”

Frey says he has friends that leave their games on all the time.

They never shut them off.

Some don’t want to lose their progress in a game, and some, he says, are just plain lazy.

The Natural Resources Defense Council says some game designers overlook the energy footprint of these things.

They added up the energy used by all the gamers in the country in a year’s time. And found it roughly equals the juice drawn by a big US city in one year.

The report’s authors compared the energy used by the three most popular gaming consoles.

And the big energy winner was the Nintendo Wii.

It uses about 8 times less energy than Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

That’s because the Wii doesn’t have the same kind of high end graphics and sound as the Xbox and Playstation – those take a lot more power to run.

Nick Zigelbaum is an energy analyst with the NRDC.

He says the games should be designed better:

“What people don’t realize is that video game consoles, although they’re very similar to laptops and computers in terms of hardware, they don’t go to sleep or go into idle mode like a computer would.”

Zigelbaum says the power hungry XBOX and Playstation games do have an autoshutdown option.

That means the games will automatically turn off if nobody’s using them.

But the games are shipped with the option turned off.

You have to manually set it.

And not all games are equal.

For some games it’s easy to save your progress – for others…
you might lose your spot in that twenty four hour car race.

Zigelbaum says that’s where the industry needs to step in:

“That’s the issue is that it’s not really standardized, it’s not really uniform throughout the whole software industry. So it would be difficult to really implement a strong auto-shutdown feature.”

Zigelbaum says a strong auto-shutdown feature would be the biggest improvement game makers could make.

That would mean no matter what – your game would be saved when the device shuts down.

If the industry did that – homeowners could save more than 100 bucks a year on their energy bills.

A Microsoft spokesperson said they encourage their users to turn the games off when they’re done.

Zigelbaum and the folks at the NRDC are hoping Microsoft and Sony will go farther – and do a better job when designing their next gaming consoles.

(snd)

Will Frey says his friends don’t really think about the energy they use.

How could you when you’ve got other things to worry about?

“Oh my gosh! That’s why the M-4 is the cheapest gun in the game. Next to LMGs.”

(snd)

That stands for “Light Machine Guns.”

Maybe next year’s gaming consoles will shoot holes in the amount of energy they use up.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Tag: sony

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