Sony has signed up to an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme called Playing for the Planet which will see the PlayStation 5 ship with a very low power standby mode.

Playing for the Planet recognizes that video games represent the fastest growing media platform and the UN wants to harness that to push for green initiatives. It wants sustainability nudges in as many games as possible and money made available for green causes through gaming. Sony's contribution is a greener PlayStation 5 console, but it will be optional.

Today, the United Nations Secretary-General's Climate Action Summit 2019 is being held in New York. Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, is using the summit to make a formal commitment to contribute to Playing for the Planet. Ryan says the improvements made to the PS4 console hardware over its lifetime have already avoided 16 million metric tons of carbon emissions. A further 29 million metric tons are expected to be saved over the next decade.

For reference, Sony states that the latest model of the PS4 Slim consumes between 0.9W and 5.4W of power depending on which Rest mode is selected. The latest PS4 Pro model uses between 1.0W and 6.4W in its different Rest modes. When turned off, all PS4 models still draw 0.2W.

For the PlayStation 5, Ryan explains in a blog post that, "I am also very pleased to announce the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W). If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes."

Ryan specifically mentions suspending gameplay, which the PS4 achieves in a Rest mode that consumes 1.7W. Doing the same on PS5 using just 0.5W would be a great improvement. Hopefully that also means the most efficient Rest mode, which currently consumes 0.9W on PS4, can also be lowered considerably.

If Sony can hit just 0.5 watts of power use in standby mode, then I'd suggest for it to make a real impact the console should ship with it turned on as the default Rest option. That way all PS5 consoles use it out the box and it's up to gamers if they want to switch to another mode.