Xbox Introduces Carbon Aware Feature To Reduce Emissions

Microsoft has announced a new feature for its consoles: carbon awareness. This is a new update for the Xbox Series X|S that regulates when updates and downloads are done during the nightly update session and optimizes them towards when the most renewable energy is being used in that console’s local energy grid. This is some sophisticated technology that also requires that regional carbon intensity data is available to the Xbox in question, but it is a fascinating solution to this issue.

 

This new feature was announced in a post on the Xbox blog, and the post elaborates on how this will work. Essentially, if your Xbox Series X|S is connected to the internet, and the relevant energy information is publicly available, then the machine will choose when it would be best to do an update. This operates alongside the Xbox Series X|S’s Shutdown functionality, which is its energy saving mode to somewhat replace the Sleep mode. According to the post, the Shutdown mode already uses up to 20X less power than the Sleep mode.

This will reduce a player’s individual power consumption, but, if adopted en masse, will be a way to reduce to overall carbon footprint of Xbox machines on an individual machine level. This new feature will, at first, only be available to those in the Xbox Insider program, but it will roll out to all Xbox Series X|S consoles in the near future.

However, there are also energy saving measures coming to the Xbox One in the form of the beforementioned Shutdown mode, which saves energy by being far more energy efficient than the Sleep mode. Furthermore, the Sleep mode on the Xbox Series X|S is also being overhauled with an “active hours” function to adjust when the machine should use more or less energy.

We don’t often think of an idle machine as using energy, but unless a console is completely turned off, it is drawing power from the grid. Modern machines tend to be energy hogs, so any features like this should be able to help offset some of the carbon emissions associated with these machines. It is not an overall solution, but a good, technologically-driven addition to have at your disposal.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed