This is what the final report on a 2008 review of the Australian Government’s use of information and communication technology (ICT) said:
There is a significant disconnect between the Government’s overall sustainability agenda and its ability to understand and manage energy costs and the carbon footprint of its ICT estate.
It would appear that government/business Internet use and just surfing the Web at home may save on paper and sometimes result in decreased car travel, but it does have greenhouse gas consequences.
Webupon discusses a 2007 article originally posted by Floating World:
We asked Aaron Handford, President of Solar Energy Host how much carbon the net itself is generating and he had some surprising answers. According to Handford, “The Internet has a big carbon footprint. It's estimated that globally it takes about 868 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity per year to run the Internet, associated PCs, routing infrastructure, and phone networks.” (UClue: Energy Use of Internet).
He notes, “Of this, about 112.5 Billion kWh are used to power "data centers", which are the servers that store all the websites."
This 2007 report concluded that:
Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005.
When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions.
The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity
terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world.
The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005
was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.
The Australian media is now reporting on the fact that a typical Internet search generates about 7g of Co2 and that globally there are 200 million searches each day.
All of this gives pause for thought.
If the average home PC user was initially thought to account for around 588 kwh of electricity per year producing an estimated 582 kg of green house gas emissions, then this (or its current equivalent) has to be added to our individual carbon footprints and the national account.
The nation also has to take into consideration not only its own PCs but just how big the carbon footprints are of the servers it uses.
With our
It is also time that ordinary Internet users began to ask the big search engines like Google, AOL, Yahoo, Firefox, etc., just what measures they are taking to actually switch their servers to clean energy.
So far we are hearing about what they are doing to 'green' their employee workplaces or transport, but little is being said about the huge amounts of dirty energy they now draw on to keep their servers going 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The rather impressive Google Climate Change Plan is notably for its failure to really come to terms with its own share of the approximately 868 billion kwhs it takes to run the Internet each year.
When it does allude to this dirty energy it speaks in terms of creating offsets, which do little to reduce actual energy consumption.
The fact that CSC, Dell Inc, Google Inc, HP, Intel Corporation, Lenova, Microsoft Corporation, have joined with the World Wildlife Fund to create the Climate Savers Computer Initiative is more a feel-good piece of PR than anything else, and if it is to be believed, almost all the servers these firms are associated with just happen to be recommended as energy efficient (115 servers in the Asia-Pacific alone).
How many kilowatt hours did you splurge on the Internet today? Using the 7 grams per search as a yardstick, I probably accounted for 1kg of greenhouse gas over only 5 hours last Monday.
Go to CO2Stats: making websites green for more information on how to get a paid audit of your own website.
UPDATE
The 7 grams per search figure is now disputed and Harvard researcher denies quote.
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