Microsoft's green initiatives for Xbox have saved over 3bn car miles of CO2 emissions

Microsoft has shared an update on its sustainability efforts on Xbox from the past three years. In that time, the company has reduced its emissions by over 3bn car miles - that's over 1.2m metric tons of CO2e.

The reduction is largely due to two initiatives. The first is players switching to the Xbox console's energy saving options to reduce their carbon footprint by optimising updates and downloads to a time when renewable energy can be utilised.

That also includes the Shutdown (energy saving) option, which reduces power consumption while the console is turned off. This can reduce power use by 20 times compared with Sleep mode.

The second is game developers using the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit to identify methods of reducing energy usage in their games.

The toolkit includes a power monitoring system, power consumption dashboards, best practice guides, and more to help developers create games as efficiently as possible.

While Microsoft hasn't provided specific examples, the toolkit has been used by the likes of 343 Industries for Halo Infinite, and Activision for its latest Call of Duty games.

Microsoft has committed to becoming carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.

"While we're proud of the progress we’ve made at Xbox to reduce our environmental impact, we know that the work towards a more sustainable future is never complete," reads an Xbox Wire blog post. "Gaming brings joy to players, but we recognize it also has an impact on our environment. Our commitment to our players and the industry is to work to improve that impact in a responsible way.

"Innovative solutions continue to emerge through deep collaboration with our players, developers, and the industry. It won’t be a straight path to 2030, but we’re committed to empowering game creators with cutting edge analytics and bespoke toolkits."

However, these efforts on Xbox are somewhat undermined by Microsoft's broader push for AI technology. AI products require huge amounts of data and are power intensive, meaning existing data centres have an increased workload and new centres must be built.

That means Microsoft will need access to green steel and concrete, as well as less carbon-intensive chips. "In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence," Microsoft president Brad Smith told Bloomberg. "So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs."

He continued: "We fundamentally believe that the answer is not to slow down the expansion of AI but to speed up the work needed to make it more environmentally friendly. I guarantee there's one way to fail: It's to give up."

According to its latest Environmental Sustainability Report, Microsoft's total energy consumption increased by around 25 percent from 2022 - 2023, although the company claims it uses 100 percent renewable energy. As Bloomberg notes, though, this consumption is mainly through renewable energy credits (RECs) and power purchase agreements (PPAs). The latter are used for companies to claim they're using green energy, but reports suggest these do not boost demand for green energy supplies.

"It is Microsoft's plan to phase out the use of unbundled RECs in future years," a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We are focused on PPAs as a primary strategy."

Elsewhere, the company is looking to boost efficiency of its existing data centres and source cheap renewable power.

Microsoft became the first console platform to offer dedicated energy consumption tools last year, as well as launching its console energy saving modes.