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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."
about World of Warcraft, a fictitious "country", using 10x more electricity than a real country, Vanuatu?
i actually just pulled that factoid out of my ass, but i'd bet good money, considering this research on the Internet and power usage, that it is true after all
Save Vanuatu! Unplug WoW!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
By how much would our energy use go down if we transitioned to servers and network equipment that use less energy? 9% seems like an awful lot to me, especially since the US relies on coal for its power production (something that generates lots of CO2)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
The information he seems to be pulling from was from the early 2000's. Many things have changed since early 2000 lowering the amount of power needed for the average home PC to operate. Most users in early 2000 were using CRT monitors which use almost 3 times as much power than a modern LCD. If I took the time to research 2000-2002 vs components in the last two years I bet you will see the power consumption of average hardware is probably close to half as much.
This figures.... doesn't the brain use about 30% of the blood oxygen.
They shouldn't count PCs, they have many more uses than just the internet.
Also, pirates counter global warming...
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
and 99.9 percent of this 9.4% is a result of pr0n!
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.
Tubes require no electricity!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
From the Article: PCs&Monitors alone use 235b out of the 350b, so it means PC&Monitors will use ~6% US power, something wrong here.
> that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year
That's simply 99 gigawatts. "kilowatt-hours per year" is silly.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's Al Gore's fault.
This is why I think the OLPC project shouldn't be limited to third world countries. These laptops run on only a couple of watts! If more first-world computer users used them for basic surfing instead of 200 watt gaming rigs, much energy/CO2/fossil fuel could be saved I think.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
So "The Internet" makes up 3.13%, not 9.4%
The other 6.27% is from desktop computers. Which may or may not be doing "internet stuff" at any moment in time. Lumping all desktop machines into the count is disingenuous.
It's still a bigger number than I would have thought. And it is a bit of an eye opener to realize how much power all those PCs are using up.
Paul Leader
Don't forget the vacuum cleaners used to clean the carpets in the buildings where the network designers and operators work, or the stereos that play music while people are browsing the net, or the electric lights that let the non-touch-typists see their keyboards at night.
Come on, unless they're somehow able to measure electricity used only while a computer user is actively viewing Internet content it's absurd to count desktop computers in the total. Or, alternatively, it's absurd to attribute the electricity usage to "the Internet". It would be valid to estimate the electricity usage of computers and/or data communications equipment, but to try to pin a number on "the Internet" and include multifunction equipment that serves non-Internet functions is just sloppy.
Come to think of it, there are probably lots of FT-2000s that carry some Internet circuits and some PSTN circuits, how do they account for that? What about the 5Es and DMSs that are carrying modem calls? Do they accurately attribute the percentage of the switch's electrical usage based on the percentage of modem vs voice calls?
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.
They'll have a hard time refuting this study!
Furthermore, a large fraction of the remaining 1/3rd of power is servers. Many of them would be run even without the internet, most probably as internal servers for 1-800 phone reps.
The actual power attributable to the Internet is probably quite small. And certainly less than the gasoline and other motor fuels used in personal shopping/research/entertainment trips reduced by the Ineternet.
Please look at the total picture. Not some sensational part.
Oh yeah that internet is sooo much less energy efficent then the manufacture, packaging, storage, shipping, and retail outlets, etc for billions of CDs and DVDs. Oh don't forget to count millions of little spinning DC motors, actuators, signal amplifiers, and laser diodes.
I wonder how much energy is actually SAVED because of the internet, quick example: email. How much energy is used shipping a letter across the country?
So...? What, you want us to turn them all off?
Yes, as a matter of fact Ted Stevens has introduced a Senate Bill to install a switch in his office, so he can turn off the internet when he's not using it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
If you are including every device contected to the Internet, then surely it is more than that. The vending machine in my building is on the Internet. My phone is on the Internet. My laser printer is on the Internet, and in a way, I believe my cable box is too. Between infrastructure, servers, telecommunications, and end systems, a huge fraction of the electricity-using devices we interact with are on the Net.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
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
Trouble is that leaving computers running is arguably a rational business tradeoff. If a desktop computer draws 250 watts (and most don't average that high), and is left on during all non-business hours (assume one works only an 8-hour day and no weekends) that is 128 hours or 32 kWh or, at $0.10/kWh, $3.20.
If your entire employee cost (pay, bonus, worker's comp, medical, office-space, etc.) is only $60,000/year, an employee needs to save less than 10-minutes/week to break even.
One coder measured his own pretty high-end machine (including support for 3 monitors) at less than 140 watts when not doing heavy processing. This doesn't include the monitor which in most systems sleeps after a short period anyway. If we use 150 watts, a 9 hour day, and $100,000 employee cost then break-even happens by the time you have saved 2 minutes 15 seconds per week or less than 30 seconds per day.
Now if it takes 2 watts cooling per watt of usage then the benefits of shutting down are greater. But on the other hand, none of the office buildings where I've worked have metered power or cooling (except for custom auxiliary units) so from the tenant perspective, leaving the machine running has no impact on power or cooling costs.
Sure, for many, waiting for a computer to boot is part of the morning routine and provides an excuse to go fill the coffee cup. But if buildings metered power and cooling usage and if computers were made to save-state and swich off and back on like a light - or at least in just 1-2 seconds - people would be much more willing to power down not only at night but at lunch and whenever they aren't using the machine.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
How much energy is spend delivering fake moon rocks, Star Trek sets, and other must-have items purchased from eBay?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Switches? Ignition keys? Everybody knows valves are better ways of shutting down tubes.
Personally, I've always preferred the "Big Red Button" approach.
Instead of spending so much to cool them down, we could set up efficient cooling arrays, or even use the heat to store energy in biomass or fuel cells instead.
The problem is that we are unwilling to revisit the basic design concepts.
Why should a "desktop" computer crank out so much heat? My son's Mac Mini doesn't. His next computer won't either.
There are better ways to do this.
Besides, most of our energy use is for: lights (could use LED lighting for 1/20 the energy), washers (heating up all that water), and dryers (if we only got rid of those covenants that didn't let people line dry clothes), and machines that aren't even being used - look at that printer in the office, it's on 24/7 but after office hours, who is printing to it?
For that matter, why are our gigapop Internet networks running 24/7 in most places? Couldn't we have master switches and routers with key servers that were on 24/7, and have the "desktops" turn OFF their monitors and even computers when no one was using it? Turn off LAN segments that aren't in use automagically.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Consider the rapid decline of newspapers - the hard copy as compared to online editions. This results in less energy-intensive and habitat-destructive logging on the one end, less fuel-burning distribution in the middle, and less waste paper to discard or recycle on the other end.
Or consider the decline of the secretarial profession. Thirty years ago every junior executive on up had his or her own secretary. Now all they get is a laptop. It takes much more energy to feed a secretary than a loptop (although the secretary potentially offers greater sexual gratification).
Then consider warehousing. Before pervasive networking enabled just-in-time deliveries to stores and businesses, there was a massive amount of warehousing that's now largely gone away. Those warehouses were usually heated, staffed, required an extra transportation leg to stock, used up real estate, and are now better than 95% obsoleted by our computer network.
The same tech that allows us to avoid warehousing also results in much less mismatch between production and demand. Lots more stuff used to be manufactured - at large energy and materials cost - just to be thrown away when the demand didn't show up.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
TFA states that 25% of the power consumed by computers goes toward powering local networking hardware, which is factored at about 20% of the total consumption of the Internet.
This means that a typical small office with 20 computers has local networking hardware consuming the equivalent of 5 PCs.
Sources cited in TFA state that each PC uses an average of (588kW/365.25/24*1000) = 67 Watts, which seems reasonable enough. But that (67*5) means that 335 Watts worth of network infrastructure gear are present in a 20-PC office, which is absurd.
I know that Cisco has been known to make some hot switches, but for fuck's sake. At my place of employ (a not-atypical 20-ish PC small office), we've just got a passively-cooled 24-port 3com switch which doesn't even get warm to the touch, two Linksys WRT54GL routers, and a cable modem.
High estimates for this scenario might be 15 Watts for the switch and 12 Watts for each of the other devices, for a total of 51 Watts for the entire network, or about 4% of that which is used by the PCs.
By these estimates, my own home network has a slightly worse ratio, at about 6%.
But even if we figure that everyone else in the world has a vastly more complicated routing and switching fabric than I portray here, I simply cannot envision this figure being beyond about 8% on average -- a far lower figure than the author's stated 25%.
This means that the total consumption of the Internet in the United States, as corrected, stands at about 8%, down from 9.4%. (Not much different expressed that way, until you realize that 1.4% of the total US electricity consumption really is a huge figure.)
If anyone else has any additional corrections to make, please do so. Your contribution helps keep the teh Intarwebs green.
Kid-proof tablet..
It's cool that somebody put a lot of money to investigate how much money we are spending in energy. Sarcasm aside, it is kind of cool to find out how much we really are using something. Well, at least through an estimate. Other than that, how is this news worthy. It would help out students to develop an argument for energy use or for a independent study to reference for their own report.
Should I be worried that downloading porn is becoming too expensive. Should we start reducing the amount of time on the computer so I can save energy. The weird thing about this is that it only accounts for 10% of energy use. What about the other 90%? According to the reverenced CIA Factbook it says that 71% of the energy produced comes from fossil fuels. How much of that is used in vehicles? I could understand coal and natural gas plants but how much of that is used for fueling planes, trains or automobiles? Secondly, businesses need computers to operate but they also need faxes, printers, not to mention light. I mean do we really have to have street lights on all night long. I mean there are millions of them and they are on for at least 8 hours each day. Again with the sarcasm, I apologize for that but come on.
Seems to be fairly common at my office. I think the idea is that having your monitor off looks bad, like you took an excessively long break or you aren't working. Hence people seem to set them so they'll never go off during the work day, even over lunch - so it always looks you just stepped out.