I cannot see that happening on the consumer side of things because consumers have generally* not looked at power consumption as a factor for which hardware to b

I cannot see that happening on the consumer side of things because consumers have generally* not looked at power consumption as a factor for which hardware to buy nor how many to run. * "generally" because home servers / media centres / etc are often picked for their power consumption. As are mining servers (eg crypto-currency). But these are by far the exception rather than the norm in terms of consumer devices.