Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
And the average cpu uses a LOT more juice. So does the average video card. Who's buying all those 550 watt PSUs?
And the average home has more computers in it than it did 5 years ago. Who do you know who has only one computer nowadays?
Kevin Smith on Prince
> 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.
Replace that with a low current LED example RS 180-8495, 2mA and 1.8V or 0.0036W. There is nothing inherently wrong with standby. The problem is that the current designs are as cheap as possible not as low power as possible. You could design a circuit to bring say a TV out of standby with a remote that consumes less than 100mW easily. It would cost more but is perfectly do able.
What is required is legislation to mandate that say standby can consume no more than 1W, then crank it down over the years. Another one would be legislation to for minimum levels of efficiency in power supplies, 85% would be a good starting point, and then crank it up over the years.