Electron actually gives you quite a bit of free help for power consumption. The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts

Electron actually gives you quite a bit of free help for power consumption. The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. For example, when it the app gets put in the background it will automatically reduce power usage. When no javascript is running the app consumes effectively no power. Now that being said there's nothing to stop developers from running lots of expensive code or being non-performant with rendering. This is true in any environment. However; having access to the type of flame-charts and profiling tools that come with Chrome / Electron go a really long way to addressing some of these issues. I work at Nylas and we've been heavily focused on reducing the amount of power the app consumes. We've still got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day processing a ton of email quickly is a fairly expensive operation. In the long run it's possible to offload very expensive work to natively compiled modules. A lot of Electron projects do this and can use Node's native bindings to connect to processes that really need to be fast in native code.