No, you cannot. A given task, running at maximum "niceness" (i.e., the lowest "priority" in regard to its peers) will happily consume 100% CPU if it has enough work to do - at least in total absence of other consumers of that resource.

SIGSTOP effectively tells the scheduler to just not allocate any CPU time to the task any more, which makes the task unable to perform any work (and also not consume any additional resources, of course).

Sigstop is pulling the car over. Nice is like pulling over if there's other traffic on the road but going full speed ahead if it's empty.

Thanks.

The `nice` (or also `idprio` on FreeBSD) will only lower the priotiry in the queue for CPU time, which means that if nothing else will need CPU it will still get as much CPU time as it wants, thus still eating battery time.