Xbox says its energy-saving initiatives are worth 1 billion car miles per year

Microsoft has published an update on its efforts to make Xbox consoles a bit greener; it reckons that its two energy-saving initiatives — one focused on the consoles’ power modes and the other on helping developers write more power-efficient code — have prevented more than 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in three years. (CO2e is a catch-all measurement for all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide.)

Those emissions are equivalent to 3 billion miles in an average gas-powered car, or 1 billion car miles per year. Put another way, that’s the combined average yearly mileage of about 74,000 American drivers. It may be a drop in the ocean when it comes to addressing climate change — global CO2e emissions in 2022 are estimated to have reached 53.8 billion tons, which is equivalent to 134 trillion car miles — but still, it’s not a bad saving for some video game coding tools and a console firmware update.

In an Xbox Wire post, Xbox’s director of sustainability Trista Patterson said explained that the energy-saving initiatives were part of Microsoft’s broader drive to become a carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste company by 2030 (a drive that has admittedly been severely compromised by Microsoft’s push into AI). Patterson went into detail on the two cornerstones of the plan: the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit for developers, and the carbon-aware downloads and power-saving modes for Xbox consoles.

The Sustainability Toolkit, unveiled at the 2023 Game Developers Conference, helps developers improve the efficiency of their code to reduce energy usage by identifying “energy bugs,” and has been employed in titles as big as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone. It has benefits beyond Xbox consoles, too, as improvements in the code often apply to other platforms the games run on.

Meanwhile, in 2023 Microsoft implemented a “carbon aware” setting for Xbox consoles that optimizes updates and downloads to run during times when the local power network is least reliant on fossil fuels. Much more significantly, it pushed an update to all Xboxes that made Shutdown rather than Sleep the default power-off setting. Shutdown uses significantly less energy, and is slower to boot up from, but the console can can still receive updates and downloads in this state.