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."

where's the derivative factoid

[circletimessquare (444983)]

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!

Re:where's the derivative factoid

[rolfwind (528248)]

i actually just pulled that factoid out of my ass

Welcome to the Internet, you just became a full fledged member.

What about energy-saving servers?

[mind21_98 (18647)]

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)

Re:What about energy-saving servers?

[Original Replica (908688)]

By how much would our energy use go down if we transitioned to servers and network equipment that use less energy?

The first place I would look to conserve energy is turning things off as opposed to standby. Televisions use 23% of their annual electricity while in standby, for VCRs that jumps to 50%. http://www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/info/documents/pdfs/lbnl-42393.pdf [energy.gov] So if we turned monitors and computers and wireless routers and printers etc, completely off when we were not using them the savings would likely be significant. As an added bonus your computer can't be a zombie spam bot when the power is turned off.

Re:What about energy-saving servers?

[EaglemanBSA (950534)]

I can count 7 LED's on my equipment where I'm sitting that I could pretty much do without...that doesn't really amount to much. LED's don't consume very much power at all (especially the low-power type found in electronics equipment) - you're talking on the order of a couple volts, and in the tens of milliamps. Example: Digikey # 67-1047-ND has a peak voltage of 2 volts, and a max current of 30 mA. At peak conditions, this puts out .06 Watts. Convert that to energy spent in a year, and it amounts to (assuming 8766 hours per year) about a half kilowatt-hour, or 5 cents, if you left that one LED on constantly, at peak, all year. That's 35 cents for all the LED's in my room, a total of 3 and a half kilowatt hours (a typical home burns about a thousand per month, or 12,000 per year). I'll just switch my computer off.

Re:What about energy-saving servers?

[jabuzz (182671)]

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.

Re:What about energy-saving servers?

[Eivind (15695)]

Or a milde variant of the same: Giving a clear grade and mandate displaying the grade prominently.

Already the case in most of Europe if you buy a dishwasher, fridge, washer, drier or lots of other household-appliances.

There's a grade for energy-efficiency, where the average for that kind of appliance is a "C" whereas an appliance that uses 30% less than average would earn an A, and an appliance that wastes 30% more energy than average earns an "F".

The stuff has been a huge success -- to the point where appliances that don't rate atleast a "B" are just not marketable at all.

The standard gets stricter automatically: As more and more people buy the energy-efficient appliances, the *average* efficiency improves, so the energy-usage for a "C" gets adjusted accordingly.

Works like a charm.

Some appliances have more than one grade, they grade efficiency on more than one scale. A dishwasher may have a note on it saying:

Energy consumption: A
Water consumption: B
Wash effectiveness: A
Drying effectiveness: A

So, I don't see why a modern TV couldn't be sold with; "Energy consumption: A", "Standby consumption: B".

Close to accurate?

[Kazrath (822492)]

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.

Re:Close to accurate?

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

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?

Re:

[jedidiah (1196)]

A 550 watt PSU is like a red sportscar or a phat offroad vehicle.

The person who buys it may not fully utilize it.

It just seems "the thing to get".

Something else to consider is the rise of laptops.

Re:

[Technician (215283)]

A popular mis conception is a 65 watt laptop power supply draws 65 watts. A 350 watt desktop power supply draws 350 watts. A 550 watt power supply draws 550 watts. These numbers is mostly WRONG. The wattage a power supply draws is equal to the amount of power drawn from the supply plus the loss in conversion (efficiency) of the supply. The wattage stamped on the box is simply the capacity of the supply. A 550 Watt supply is supposed to be able to provide 550 Watts out. If the supply is 90% efficient,

Re:

[Charcharodon (611187)]

That's a poor analogy.

Power supplies don't just magically use power when they are on. It takes a load (video card, motherboard, cpu, etc) to be drawing that power.

Now there is a question of efficiency, but that has nothing to do with it's power rating. A 400w power supply with a 60% efficiency rating is going to piss away more electricity in the form of heat that a 550w that is rated at 85% efficiency.

The el cheapo power supply with the lower rating may not cost much now, but you'll pay it all back

Re:

[tlhIngan (30335)]

A 550 watt PSU won't even adequately power a SLI/Crossfire setup. They're selling kilowatt PSU's these days. Hell, I see one outfit selling a 1.6KW PSU. Now that might be overkill.

How is that possible? It would mean either the power supply can only supply around 1.3kW, or you're gonna have to hire an electrician to wire in a new 20 amp circuit just for that PC.

A regular 15 amp service at 110V only gives you 1650 watts of power. A PSU rated at 1600W, at "80+" certification (which so far appears to mean they'

Re:Close to accurate?

[turing_m (1030530)]

"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.

Oxygen to the Brain

[truckaxle (883149)]

This figures.... doesn't the brain use about 30% of the blood oxygen.

Re:Oxygen to the Brain

[Tablizer (95088)]

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
         

meh

[Eternauta3k (680157)]

They shouldn't count PCs, they have many more uses than just the internet.
Also, pirates counter global warming...

Re:meh^2

[redelm (54142)]

Agreed on the PCs, especially those in business settings. Many of those are forbidden or otherwised blocked from the Internet. And would exist and be run without the Internet. Their predecessors were.

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

Re:

[nine-times (778537)]

Yeah, so they're basically including all computer equipment, not just "the Internet". They're even including servers in datacenters and air conditioning in datacenters.

So computer equipment uses a decent percentage of all electricity in a civilization where a lot of industry is based on knowledge, entertainment, and other intellectual property, most of which has gone digital. Thanks, captain obvious. Next thing you know, you'll tell me that a large percentage of oil and coal are used in transportation a

That's not the only problem with the report

[adolf (21054)]

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

99.9%

[SevenHands (984677)]

and 99.9 percent of this 9.4% is a result of pr0n!

Careful how you count

[Tablizer (95088)]

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)

Re:

[jedidiah (1196)]

What about when I read CNN or Slashdot.org through MythBrowser on my 55 inch projection TV?

Doesn't really apply to families.

[pavon (30274)]

That would mean that TV power is going to PC's instead.

That may be true for people who live by themselves. But consider a family of 4 with one computer and one television. They take turns using the computer, while the remaining three watch TV. So each individual's TV time decreases by 1/4, but the total time that the television is on remains the same. Thus the power used by the computer is in addition to that of the television.

What nonsense.

[Kingrames (858416)]

Tubes require no electricity!

Ridiculous Units

[John Hasler (414242)]

> that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year

That's simply 99 gigawatts. "kilowatt-hours per year" is silly.

Re:Ridiculous Units

[dgatwood (11270)]

While you're right that 868 billion kwh/yr. is about 99 gigawatt-hours per hour, or 99 gigawatts continuous, I think it is moderately more understandable to use the more traditional time-based watt-hour units rather than the continuos watt units, as that's what people are used to seeing on their electric bill. I'd have probably described it as 868 terawatt-hours annually, though, and put 868 billion kwh in parentheses.

Re:

[DJ Rubbie (621940)]

Or according to Einstein (and Google):

868 billion kilowatt hours = 3.1248 × 1018 joules
(3.1248 × (10 ** 18) joules) / (c ** 2) = 34.768089 kilograms

So keeping the current Internet running requires turning nearly 35 kilograms of mass into electricity.

Blame Game

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's Al Gore's fault.

Low Wattage Laptops

[lobiusmoop (305328)]

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.

Re:Low Wattage Laptops

[KKlaus (1012919)]

Would it? Reminds me of the finding that hybrid cars didn't cut down on fossil fuel consumption as much as many people thought because since they were more efficient, people drove them more. I don't doubt that the computers themselves would use less energy, but I suspect people might then use some of the money that they save from their laptop and use it to keep the house cooler/warmer or whatever.

Not that that would be a bad thing of course, but since people already tend to moderate their electricity usage to what they can (or want) to afford, lowering use in one area must simply see it transfered to another - rather than reducing overall consumption.

Cheers.

Err, so "the internet actually makes up 3.13%

[NoNeeeed (157503)]

The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total)

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.

Don't forget

[Paul Carver (4555)]

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?

But what does it save?

[redefinescience (983582)]

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?

What about all that eBay crap?

[NotQuiteReal (608241)]

How much energy is spend delivering fake moon rocks, Star Trek sets, and other must-have items purchased from eBay?

The flip side

[femto (459605)]

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.

Newspapers &c.

[wytcld (179112)]

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

Re:

[suv4x4 (956391)]

The numbers do suggest that electronic equipment needs to be more efficient.

You don't know that before seeing the full pie chart. How much do other common tasks and equipment fair on this scale?

Internet and Desktop PC-s perform thousands of roles crucial for our daily lives, given how many millions of computers and Internet end-points operate, and how many uses those have, 9% is certainly not that much. We'd definitely have worse carbon emissions if it wasn't for the remote data transmission Internet allows

I'm sure it's more

[njfuzzy (734116)]

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.

internet consumes the same as the space shuttle?

[viking80 (697716)]

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

We need "lightbulb" computers

[linuxwrangler (582055)]

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.

If we just used blade computers and LCD screens

[WillAffleckUW (858324)]

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.

Re:If we just used blade computers and LCD screens

[stonecypher (118140)]

Why should a "desktop" computer crank out so much heat? My son's Mac Mini doesn't.

You might as well condemn a commercial stove for dumping more heat than a Tastybake Oven, given that it and the Mac are both powered by dim bulbs.

Bittorrent

[goombah99 (560566)]

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.

Re:

[evanbd (210358)]

That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes.

No, it's not equivalent. It saves *some* (in the winter, not in the summer obviously), but it's most definitely *not* equivalent. A lot of people use gas heat, which is cheaper. Those that use electric heat are almost exclusively using heat pumps -- basically an air conditioner with the hot coils on the inside. Heat pumps expend electricity to *move* heat from outdoors to indoo

Re:

[postbigbang (761081)]

In another way of thinking, actual efficiency of systems is about .03% (really). Therefore for every watt consumed, at least another watt is used to *cool*.

If we lived on ice year-round, then it's not waste heat. But every data center spends at least 2x maintaining an even ambient temperature.

Wonder why the CPU makers and server makers are suddenly on a 'green' bandwagon? Think again.

Re:

[cromar (1103585)]

They'll have a hard time refuting this study [seanbonner.com]!

Re:And...

[User 956 (568564)]

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.

Re:

[MoriaOrc (822758)]

Personally, I've always preferred the "Big Red Button" [turnofftheinternet.com] approach.

Re:

[toddestan (632714)]

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.