A new report released by the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that consumers have been less interested in high powered electronics gear.

It is a bit of a no brainer considering that consumers have been using mobile gadgets to look at their email and surf the net while using their PCs to do proper work. But the CEA said that the falling power demand has been driven by increased efficiency and changing consumer habits. 

For a start those old CRT tellies have been replaced by LCDs and new models draw a lot less juice than the old ones. Even when users have switched on their destops, they are using less power than they did a few years ago. In the good old days your average PC would idle at 123W and would need 156W if it was flat out. The newer computers idle at 27W and full bore at 102W. 

In the consumer market some users are using tablets and smartphones — and those devices tend to use just 2-5W of energy. It is also possible that as users shove more of their computing onto the cloud, that power consumption will also reduce.