Going Green

How to make your PC more environmentally friendly

- Duncan Geere

It’s funny how gamers will jump through all sorts of hoops to save a fictional planet if they’re asked to by a quest-giving NPC, but rarely think about doing the same when it comes to the real thing. The energy-guzzling PC sitting on, or below, your desk may not compare to a coal-fired power plant when it comes to environmental impact, but a 2015 study (www.bit.ly/ energypc) found that a typical gaming computer uses about the same amount of energy as three refrigerators (or ten Xbox consoles). So here’s a quest for you—how can you make your PC more environmentally-friendly, and quieter and cheaper to run in the process?

Let’s outline the problem first. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the planet is getting warmer and humans are responsible. The Earth can regulate its temperature over long time spans, but our fondness for digging up and burning coal, oil and gas is tipping the scales. The greenhouse gases that are released in the process act as a blanket that intercepts heat as it’s being vented out into space and redirects it back to the surface. If your computer was powered by renewable energy, this wouldn’t be such a problem. But more than half of the UK’s electricity in 2016 came from burning fossil fuels.

The study mentioned above found that gaming PCs only account for about 2.5% of PCs worldwide, but they account for about 20% of global computer energy use. Those numbers have probably changed since then with the rise of cryptocurrency mining, but the truth remains that gamers— while relatively few in number compared to other PC users— bear an outsized share of energy usage.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH