BOB FOUND
If you own and use a smartphone, tablet or computer and are connected to the internet (and who isn’t?), you are responsible for much of the energy use and pollution that the web creates. Missing from the conversation on climate change is our insatiable use of this resource.
We users are always being encouraged to shut off our computers when they won’t be used for a period of time. Google, owner and operator of some of the largest data centres (also known as “server farms”) in the world, has 2.5 million servers (computers) running constantly. Microsoft has a million servers. There are 75 million servers in total in the world, servicing the internet 24-7. Apple will soon have 23 acres of computer hardware “under roof,” and they also lease server time from Google.
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), there are three million data centres in the U.S. alone, consuming billions of litres of water which are required for cooling, and 70 billion kilowatt hours of electricity every year.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates this power consumption to be two per cent of the entire energy use for the United States. (Read that sentence again.)
To generate 70 billion kWh, power plants with a baseload capacity of 8,000 megawatts would be needed — equivalent to eight big nuclear reactors, or twice the output of all the solar panels in the U.S.
The carbon footprint of ICT (information and communication technology), is on a par with the entire aviation industry’s emissions from fuel (and you know how we criticize that sector).
According to the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, the amount of electricity consumed by the operations of the online currency Bitcoin was set to produce an annual amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to one million transatlantic flights.
Very few people realize this problem even exists.
“In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next 10 years,” a Guardian article said.
Sending an email, using search engines, watching movies, storing data — all these activities pollute: the web today generates two per cent of the CO2 emissions of the planet. And this is just the beginning of this new form of pollution. Indeed, within four years, digital pollution will represent three to four per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Every day, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube. Researchers at the University of Bristol calculated that in 2016, people watching videos on YouTube resulted in about 11.13 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, a standard unit of measure that indicates carbon footprint. That’s similar to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by a city the size of Frankfurt, Germany, or Glasgow, Scotland, over a year.
The research firm IDC estimates that by the year 2025, about 152,000 new devices will be jumping, directly or indirectly, onto the Internet every minute, bringing the total number of connected devices to 80 billion worldwide.
Moreover, the rate of population growth in many countries is rising rapidly. According to the United Nations, the population of Iraq is growing by 344 per cent; Nigeria’s by over 400 per cent — to possibly more than 900 million people. This is not just a “developing countries” issue. The United States is projected to grow by more than 40 per cent, from 315 million to a total of 450 million people in the next 80 years.
Cutting back our thirst for data might be the ultimate way to prevent energy use going into hyperdrive. But it’s hard to see anyone agreeing to limit their Netflix use, which accounts for more than one-third of Internet traffic in the United States. Banning high-definition colour cameras on phones alone could reduce data traffic in Europe by 40 per cent, says Ian Bitterlin, a consulting engineer and data-centre expert in Cheltenham, U.K.
A recently published book, New Dark Age by British writer James Bridle, cites a study in Japan that suggests that by 2030, the power requirements of digital services will outstrip the nation’s entire current generation capacity. An American report from 2013 — ironically enough, commissioned by coal industry lobbyists — pointed out that using either a tablet or smartphone to wirelessly watch one hour of video a week used roughly the same amount of electricity (largely consumed at the data-centre end of the process) as two new domestic fridges.
Irrespective of the good work carried out by some tech giants (Apple says it uses 100 per cent renewable energy), and whether or not we take seriously projections that the entire communications technology industry could account for up to 14 per cent of carbon emissions by 2040, one stark fact remains: the vast majority of electricity used in the world’s data centres comes from non-renewable sources, and as their numbers rapidly increase, there are no guarantees that this will change.
Bottom line: if you really care about the environment, throw away your smartphone or tablet. Don’t use the Internet.
Bob Found provided installation and maintenance services for industrial computer data systems in the oil and gas industry. He lives in Indian Harbour. Sources: Forbes, The Guardian (U.K.), Nature, Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Gulf News (Dubai)
