Games are big, no doubt about it. But with game consoles nationwide consuming an estimated 16 billion kilowatt hours per year the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is hoping for some management of their burgeoning electrical appetites. The environmental organization recently published a report on home console energy consumption and outlined trends in power usage and possible avenues to reduce waste.

Nintendo's Wii, however, is clearly a different beast from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. When measured for power consumption the Wii actually used less power than its predecessor, the GameCube, and just a little more than twice that of the ancient Super Nintendo. Low energy consumption was one of the features that Nintendo touted on the Wii's unveiling, and it seems to be supported by the NRDC's data. In comparison, both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 made large jumps in energy consumption over previous consoles. In fact, the NRDC found that the Wii was "using one-fifth to one-ninth as much power, in active and idle modes, as the more power hungry Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3."

One possible reason for this is the Wii's more modest graphical ambitions compared to the other consoles. Another might be the Wii's comparative lack of additional multimedia functions. Either way, this difference in power consumption was significant enough that the NRDC opted to exclude the Nintendo Wii from additional extensive testing performed on the other consoles utilizing multiple games and including networked connectivity.

The NRDC also ran tests on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to determine energy usage while playing movies, citing a study claiming that 75% of PS3 owners intended to use their console as their primary movie player. Unfortunately, the NRDC found that "the Sony PS3 used more than five times the power of a stand-alone Sony Blu-ray player while playing the same movie." The Xbox 360 fared similarly.

Nintendo initially promised that the Wii would feature DVD playback, but removed the feature from launch and has since virtually forgotten the topic. The Wii is the only current-generation console on the market without movie player functionality.

However, the Wii lacks an important power-saving feature that both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 offer: an automatic power-down setting after a set number of idle hours. The NRDC allows that power consumption will continue to grow, but believes that a widely used automatic power-down feature designed not to impede user experience would result in drastic cost savings. With more consoles getting sold every year, and ever increasing technological demands, the issue of console power management, or lack of it, is sure to stick around.