Your Game Console Could Be Driving Up Your Power Bill

Electricity (Photo credit: Andrew from Sydney)

America’s Unused Game Consoles Eat Up as Much Power as All of Houston

What’s staggering about the amount of electricity consumed by this latest generation of video game consoles isn’t how much they use when they’re being played—it’s when they’re not being played.

America’s PS4s, Xbox Ones, and Nintendo Wii Us are “on track to consume as much electricity each year as all the homes in Houston … and cost consumers more than $1 billion to operate annually,” according to a new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report found that most of the energy isn’t going into gaming; most of it will be consumed when the consoles are just sitting in standby mode but still waiting for voice to wake it up.