Would Linux utilise less electricity than Windows?

[mintydroid]

Linux really need serious development work in this area. I run Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 Cinnamon on my Ivy Bridge 2.5Ghz i5 Macbook Pro and HD4000 graphics. The CPU's cores hover at an average of no more than 15% but down to a third or even a fifth of that mostly. RAM is 4GB but I never even got to use 2GB. Highest use thus far was 1.4GB! I am not sure what the need for 16GB on a Linux box would be, referring to the average home & office application.

I've got a nuc and microserver doing the same with Linux Mint 17 LTS. Cpu usage hovers around 15%-20% and ram most of the time is around 1 gig yet I have have 10gb on the microserver and 6gb on the nuc.