U.S. gamers consume as much electricity yearly as San Diego

An ultimately useless (but sort of interesting) statistic was uncovered by intrepid boffins at Scientific American, once they put down their damn game controllers: in total, U.S. videogame consoles consume as much electricity annually as the entire city of San Diego in the same period. Cra-zee.

Furthermore, we’d save half of all that energy if we got off our asses and turned our consoles off, and didn’t leave them switched on to download the latest 4TB demo from Xbox Live Arcade (guilty).

EPRI [Electric Power Research Institute] said if the heaviest gamer plays about six hours a day over a year — a figure found by Nielsen Co. in 2006 — then his Wii would consume 29 kilowatt-hours, his Playstation 178 kWh, and his Xbox 360 184 kWh. A plasma TV, by comparison, averages 242 kWh a year.

That makes gaming a formidable energy user. U.S. homes have about 63 million video game consoles, and together they use about as much energy as San Diego does in a year, according to a 2008 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Much of the energy use isn’t even from playing video games, according to NRDC — it’s from the idling that goes on after the gamer has left the room. The group said idling uses about as much energy as playing.

If gamers turned off their systems when they finished playing, and if manufacturers made systems that turned themselves off when inactive, consumers would save $1 billion a year in utility bills, NRDC said.

Crazier still: all these numbers are excluding the juice slurped up by the required television.

[Scientific American, via Geekologie]