The Internet uses 9.4 % of electricity in the US, 5.3 % worldwide

Equipment powering the internet accounts annually for 9.4% (or 350 billion kWh) of the total electricity consumption in the US, and 5.3% (or 868 billion kWh) of the global usage.

That's from a research conducted by David Sarokin at Uclue, an online pay-for-answers service. The figures cover computers and monitors (roughly two-thirds of the total), data centers (one-eight) as well as networking and transmission equipment. They do not cover the energy that goes into producing and distributing computers and equipment, nor that powering printers and other non-communicating devices. Also, left out is the fast-growing non-computer set of Internet-enabled devices, such as PDAs, smartphones, etc. Sarokin has published the details his calculations, and for what I can judge they look generally accurate -- although of course a generous margin of error should be considered, given the difficulties inherent with such a calculation but also specific elements such as, for example, the relative growth of laptops (they consume less than desktops) etc..

Even allowing for such a margin, these figures are huge, and they underscore an untold reality: the supposedly immaterial information economy runs on significant infrastructure and requires significant energy. The idea that an average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as an average Brazilian is not just the stuff of urban legends. And energy consumption is spiking upwards. According to a Sept 2006 report by IDC, today every dollar invested in computer hardware in data centers entails 54 cents in energy costs; IDC projects this figure to grow to 71 cents by 2010, and 1 euro by 2012.

(I have already touched on this topic in previous posts about server farms).

(Cross-posted on WattWatt)

Comments

[ed]

Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States to Cities. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State & City energy consumptions, demographics and much more down to your local US City level...

http://www.eredux.com/states/

[Greg]

I wonder how much all of these javascript/flash/etc apps and animations running in background tabs in browsers add up to?

That little goldenmaus animation at the bottom of this page is sitting there using up my cpu as I write this. I'll have to close the tab to keep it from using cpu.

And what of all of these dynamic server generated pages? Are they really necessary? A former employer of mine had folks that wanted the entire site set us so that a page would be dynamically generated each time the user hit it. Never mind that this sort of thing could be done once for each page by generating the page once as it is used.

[Bruce Nordman]

This figure is clearly wrong. Similarly erroneous figures have been debunked at extreme length in the past, see:

http://enduse.lbl.gov/Projects/InfoTech.html

for more. I am actively engaged in work on this topic; anyone who has data is encouraged to contact me -- BNordman@LBL.gov . I would discourage characterizing energy use of "The Internet" as the sum of the consumption of any device connected to it -- I think this confuses rather than enlightens people. More useful is to report the consumption of key types of devices, such as network equipment, servers, storage, PCs, displays, etc.

--Bruce