In a post over on the Xbox Wire, Microsoft have announced that they are doing some big changes to the way Xbox consoles will work going forward, in order to allow for less impact on the environment.

There is a lot to read in the post, which is something I highly suggest, but the two points are that you can finally set active hours for your consoles and make use of a new power mode called shutdown.

The Active Hours update means that you can tell your consoles when you will likely use it, say after work and the console will then ensure that when its not those hours, different options can happen. If your power state is set to Sleep, the console will go into a low power option outside of active hours, dropping the power usage from 10-15W to 0.5W, meaning a massive decrease. When the active hours roll around, the console will come back to life, allowing for quick boot and all the additional features.

The other mode is shutdown, which doesn’t sound that different to telling your console to never go to sleep and actually turn off. This mode mode is a one-time update to your power settings will reduce your power consumption while your console is off, and will not affect performance, gameplay, or your console’s ability to receive overnight updates to system, games or apps. Remote features are supported while the console is powered-on; however, remote wake is not supported while the console is shut down. Of course, the power savings when using this mode is insane, as the console draws almost no power.

Now you can of course turn the power off at the socket, in order to ensure your console draws no power at all, but that is an extreme measure. Either way, it is great to see Xbox taking steps to ensure that they are doing more for the planet and given the Xbox colour is green, they are starting to live up to it.