Clicking on all those viral videos, chain emails, celebrity tweets and paparazzi photos online adds up enough energy to rank the Internet –- if it were a country -– fifth in the world for electricity use.
That’s more power than Russia uses, according to a new report about cloud-computing from Greenpeace.
Computer servers in data centers account for about 2% of global energy demand, growing about 12% a year, according to the group. The servers, Greenpeace said, can suck up as much power as 50,000 average U.S. homes.
But most of what powers the cloud comes from coal and nuclear energy rather than renewable sources such as wind and solar, according to Greenpeace. Clusters of data centers are emerging in places like the Midwest, where coal-powered electricity is cheap and plentiful, the group said.
In its report, the organization zeroed in on 10 major tech companies, including Apple, Twitter and Amazon. Recently, the group has waged a feisty fight against Facebook, which relies on coal for 53.2% of its electricity, according to Greenpeace.
Many companies, the organization said, tightly guard data about the environmental impact and energy consumption of their IT operations. They also focus more on using energy efficiently than on sourcing it cleanly, Greenpeace said.
Yahoo landed bonus points for siting facilities near clean energy hot spots and using coal-based power for just 18.3% of its portfolio. Google got love for its extensive support of wind and solar projects and for creating a subsidiary, Google Energy, that can buy electricity directly from independent renewable power producers.
In 2005, the U.S. had 10.3 million data centers gobbling up enough energy to power all of Britain for two months, according to Internet marketing company WordStream.
Each month, electricity used to power searches on Google produces 260,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide and is enough to power a freezer for 5,400 years, according to WordStream. The searches use up 3.9 million kilowatt-hours -– the equivalent of 5 million loads of laundry.
A single spam email of the 62 trillion sent each year creates 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide. A Google search for “Soylent Green” spawns the same amount as driving a car three inches.
Internet and other components of information communication and technology (ICT) industry annually produces more than 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, and is expected to double by 2020, a new study has found.
Researchers from the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) and Bell Labs explain that the information communications and technology (ICT) industry, which delivers Internet, video, voice and other cloud services, produces about 2% of global CO2 emissions — the same proportion as the aviation industry produces.
In the report published in journal Environmental Science & Technology, researchers said their projections suggest that ICT sector's share in greenhouse gas emission is expected to double by 2020.
They have also found new models of emissions and energy consumption that could help reduce their carbon footprint.
The study said that controlling those emissions requires more accurate but still feasible models, which take into account the data traffic, energy use and CO2 production in networks and other elements of the ICT industry.
Existing assessment models are inaccurate, so they set out to develop new approaches that better account for variations in equipment and other factors in the ICT industry.
They describe development and testing of two new models that better estimate the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of Internet and telecommunications services.
The researchers suggest, based on their models, that more efficient power usage of facilities, more efficient use of energy-efficient equipment and renewable energy sources are three keys to reducing ICT emissions of CO2.
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