Does "use hardware acceleration when available" feature in google chrome consume more battery?

The GPU is designed specifically to put graphics on the screen, taking images from specific locations, converting them to a relevant format, rendering them onto a plane along with a bunch of text and so on.

It is specifically designed to do the tasks associated with displaying pictures and text and videos and can do most of these jobs more effectively and efficiently than your CPU can. Video decoding in particular is a lot more power efficient when done using the hardware built into your graphics card as opposed to being decoded by the CPU.

In general enabling hardware accelerated graphics will result in faster page rendering and use of hardware video decoding amongst other enhancements.

That's not to say that there aren't times when it is more power efficient to have only one device (the CPU) running rather than both the CPU and GPU. In applications without heavy use of graphics disabling the GPU could effectively reduce power consumption.

WebGL only works on chrome if this checkbox is enabled - once activated the browser is suddenly transformed into rendering staggering 3D animations which does drain battery more than staring at a static page

Easy way to determine real-time battery usage is to watch a CPU/GPU temperature widget ... if temp goes up battery is getting drained faster