Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US 271
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Re:where's the derivative factoid (Score:5, Funny)
What about energy-saving servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about energy-saving servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What about energy-saving servers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about energy-saving servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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".
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Close to accurate? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Close to accurate? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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.
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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'
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Ok, point taken.
So, the underutilized red sports car analog now officially belongs to the 1+ KW SLI camp.
Non-SLI 550-Watt single-GPU rigs have accordingly been demoted to being the analog of the underutilized blue sports car.
Thanks for the tip!
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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
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Also consider that today's power supplies are often >80% efficient, which is probably doubled in the last five years. In addition, Windows now implements CPU Idle functionality which it did not do in Win 98 IIRC, re
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> "Why do you assume that this 550 Watt power supply is constantly drawing 100% power? "
I could say "why do you assume that 300 watt power supplies 7 years ago were constantly drawing 100% power?"
If they're both drawing on average 50%, then power use still has almost doubled.
> Also consider that today's power supplies are often >80% efficient
Only the most expensive - most sub-$100 PS are only 25 to 40% efficient.
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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?
Actually, the average CPU nowadays is pretty good at dropping down in power usage when idling (something mostly unheard of in the "mhz race" that characterized the early new millennium). And most people have integrated "video cards" now (ie. built into the motherboard) which use way less power... the 550w PS are for the crazies (extreme minority).
And lets not forget that the ratio of (power efficient) laptops to computers has increased dramatically over the years...
But yea, there are more computers than e
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At full tilt now, between my work computers and those my family use, we've got 1 router (cisco), 4 WAPs (for us and the neighborhood), 4 "desktop/server" types running (2 headless), and my wife'
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Re:Close to accurate? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oxygen to the Brain (Score:5, Funny)
I fownd if i skip spailing and grammr i cut my brane oxign yusag in haf. i gotta green brane, dood
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It's like using a smaller monitor & only half your video card.
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, pirates counter global warming...
Re:meh^2 (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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At night when they are left on and nobody is using them they just act as space heaters. Now consider a building that is running both A/C and is full of idle computers and you have a lot of wasted energy. I know many people say that stand-by use more energy than necessary, but it uses a heck of a lot less than one left on for no reason.
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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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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% (Score:5, Funny)
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But it makes up for it all by reducing the birth rate.
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Were you referring to the internet, or the pr0n?
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Pr0n is the beginning of a new era (Score:2)
My name is John Titor, and I'm from the future. In the next five years, a man already known in your time for an innovative invention will stun investors and send panic through energy markets with his Wankamo, a masturbation-powered battery charger that attaches to the forearms of the growing number of desperate North American nerds.
Using the Wankamo, desperate nerds will attempt to attract w
Careful how you count (Score:5, Interesting)
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The flat-screen monitor trend will no doubt reverse this, eventually, but the disparity is big, and there's a tremendous installed base of CRT monitors out there. Not to mention that flat-screen TVs are slowly catching on.
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Doesn't really apply to families. (Score:3, Insightful)
What nonsense. (Score:4, Funny)
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really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hybrid desktops? (Score:2)
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Seems like having the same processor draw less power when not under load would be more straightforward. It almost seems like there's something out there that does this already... Some kind of "portable computer" or something crazy like that.
(but yeah, it'd be nice if that technology found its way into mostly over-powered general purpose desktops)
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Ridiculous Units (Score:5, Informative)
That's simply 99 gigawatts. "kilowatt-hours per year" is silly.
Re:Ridiculous Units (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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That's simply 99 gigawatts. "kilowatt-hours per year" is silly.
(I hope I got that calculation right; those US units are a true nightmare
Not silly! (Score:2)
Not sillier than "miles per gallon". Why do I say my car gets 15 kilometers/liter, instead of saying it gets 1500(square centimeter)**(-2)? Because what I need is a practical way to determine how much fuel I need for a given trip, not a theoretical number.
When you mention "kilowatt-hours per year" you get kind of information that's different from simple kilowatts. Power consumption is not uniform, to supply 8760 kilowatt-hours per year you need more generation capacity on
if they say so (Score:2)
While new machines can suck the juice the previous one had a 2000 watt disk drive.
Here at least the internet only added a couple wall-warts and an extra GHz on the CPUs.
At home, there are 2 decent computers pretty much online only. That is about half
Blame Game (Score:5, Funny)
Low Wattage Laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
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I know, i'll trade it in for 50 of these laptops and build a beowulf cluster, super!
Ahahaha. Oh you were serious?
Re:Low Wattage Laptops (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Support systems (Score:2)
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Err, so "the internet actually makes up 3.13% (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What about all that eBay crap? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The flip side (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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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
Obligatory Simpsons (Score:2)
Slashdotted. (Score:2)
Doubt that's true (Score:2)
That doesn't seem to pass the initial sniff test. I know that on the consumer end, it's nowhere near that amount. And on the business end, at least from what I'm familiar with, the percentage is still lower than that. Sure, various ISPs, Google, and other places may drive it up, but still...
It looks like they are assuming that if a PC is connected to the internet, that all electricity consumed by that pc, monitor,
I'm sure it's more (Score:3, Informative)
internet consumes the same as the space shuttle? (Score:4, Interesting)
868 billion kilowatt-hours per year = 10^11W=100GW
Space shuttle liftoff: 100GW
Aw, man... (Score:2)
Desktops? (Score:2)
What if im multitasking? 100% of my power usage isnt going to view that webpage or email, its a small percentage.
We need "lightbulb" computers (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
its not "internet" then (Score:2)
If we just used blade computers and LCD screens (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Bittorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
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Re:And... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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No! No! No! No! No!
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