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

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

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?

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?

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?

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.

meh

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

99.9%

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

Careful how you count

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)

What nonsense.

Tubes require no electricity!

Ridiculous Units

> that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year

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

Re:Ridiculous Units

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.

Blame Game

It's Al Gore's fault.

Low Wattage Laptops

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

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%

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.

But what does it save?

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?

The flip side

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.

internet consumes the same as the space shuttle?

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

If we just used blade computers and LCD screens

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

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.

Re:Close to accurate?

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:Close to accurate?

"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.

Re:Oxygen to the Brain

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
         

Bittorrent

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:And...

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.