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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.
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.
> 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."
This figures.... doesn't the brain use about 30% of the blood oxygen.
I fownd if i skip spailing and grammr i cut my brane oxign yusag in haf. i gotta green brane, dood
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
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.
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
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! --