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Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US
ribuck writes "Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to research by David Sarokin at online pay-for-answers service Uclue. Worldwide, that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total), plus other energy sinks including modems, routers, data processing equipment and cooling equipment."
Remember the article that more are browsing the web *instead* of watching TV? That would mean that TV power is going to PC's instead. (Except maybe for those who leave both on, and some PC's + monitor take more power than a TV)
Table-ized A.I.
So then I guess you are saying that since bittorrent comsumes about 50% of the internet bandwith it consumes perhaps half 4% of the power. Of course since bit torrent can be an edge network this might be more or less than 50% of power depending on if the edge is more or less efficient thant the backbone. My guess is that it is less efficient but that's arguable. One factor is if you want your home heated or not. That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes. The opposite is true if you had the AC on. On the backbone all waste heat is working against the AC.
By the same token spam is also a major consume of world power. Now that would be a good reason to go against that!
If we assume most traffic is one the backbone and that the backbone scales as the number of servers running it. Then we only have a few more years before the power consumed by the internet will be larger than todays total power budget. This seems impossible. Ergo the traffic must be out on the edges. And there the scaling may be different with power.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It would also be interesting to know how much energy the Internet saves. For example instead of people flying around they talk on VoIP or have a teleconference. Documents are emailed rather than having to be flown around the world. Music and movies are downloaded rather than people driving to the shops for a disk. Or is the Internet is promoting long distance relationships that otherwise just would not be?
The numbers do suggest that electronic equipment needs to be more efficient.
9.4% is probably way off, but here are some conversions/comparisons anyway:
868 billion kilowatt-hours per year = 10^11W=100GW
Space shuttle liftoff: 100GW
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
"lowering the amount of power needed for the average home PC to operate."
And this will continue to change. People are becoming aware of resource scarcity, and want to insure themselves from rising prices. Witness the rise of cheap power meters such as the Kill-A-Watt. These took years to move over to 240V simply because they couldn't keep up with the demand for 110V items.
Something like a WRAP uses 5 Watts. Use it as a firewall/router/ADSL modem/traffic shaper, and it's going to be a cheaper and smaller solution than the typical 20+ Watt modem/router box.
Even CRTs have dropped in power usage compared to what they used to.
We are rapidly approaching the day when our computers will be fast enough for most tasks, the hard drive will be solid state, the system will be passively cooled and made from reliable parts that will last for decades, drawing minimal power. Any media that won't fit on the solid state hard drive can be stored on the spinning kind and plugged in as needed via USB/eSATA/firewire.
Intel probably doesn't want us to have these systems. AMD may or may not. Via certainly does, and you can bet that for pretty much everyone in the first world there is a market for several of these type of systems at a $300 price point or so. That may be a reduction in profitability for Intel, but it will be a massive new market for others, and getting easier to enter all the time.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.