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I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again. I was

I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again. I was listening to music on Youtube pretty much all the time and that amounted to about 35GB of traffic per month in average. That's 420GB per year and with 7kWh/GB and emissions of approximately 500g/kWh that's a surprising total of roughly 1.5t of CO_2 emissions per year. And a downside is almost non-existant. Edit: my playlist consists of a small number of songs, so I actually get savings. That would not work when listening to a list that does not actually repeat of course.

tjoff 7y ago
Where on earth did you dig up the 7kWh/GB figure from?
- _Microft 7y ago
  It was mentioned in [0], it's actually the higher one of two different sources (I haven't looked at the sources to be honest because that would require actually finding them which I haven't yet): A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte. [0] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud (2017)
  - tjoff 7y ago
    It's an absurd number that can't really be considered as is. Does that include storage for 100 years? Or just the few seconds needed for transfer. Do they count all of the datacenters energy usage as something needed to just transfer and store the data (with no other processing)? Unfortunately that article didn't answer anything.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Those numbers are way off. The article cites a study claiming 5 kWh here: https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00... It's from 2012 and cites numbers from as long ago as 2009 to determine normalized energy intensity. It also combines different numbers in a way that mean you can't estimate how much energy is saved by downloading a gigabyte to local storage instead of repeatedly streaming it. The single largest energy segment in their estimate is actually desktop computers! And it counts the energy used by CPU-intensive scripts along with the energy required by actual data transfer. Sanity check: Cisco estimates "busy hour" internet traffic at around 3 petabits per second in 2019. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-p... If it took 5 kWh/GB for data transfer during that busy hour, corresponding peak hour electricity use would be in excess of 6.5 terawatts. But that's more electricity than the world can generate in any given hour.
    - hn23 7y ago
      Even if the numbers are way off it is obvious that watching TV or listening music over a packet based protocol is way more energy consuming than any UKW sender can be. UKW scales - streaming does not without more energy because you need more computers.
      - tjoff 7y ago
        UKW?
        hn23 7y ago
        Ultra Kurzwelle (ultra short radio wave). No idea what the translation to English is.
nroets 7y ago
I'm surprised to hear it takes 7 kWh to transmit 1 GB. My phone consumes only 0.3 kWh a month and I use 1 GB. So the power requirements are very asymmetric.
- CondensedBrain 7y ago
  That probably factors in the infrastructure it takes to deliver the data.
  - _Microft 7y ago
    Yes, it is comparing what it takes to load a file from disk or from remote. It needs to include the share of the used infrastructure for that.
classicsnoot 7y ago
I am in awe, comrade, and from your inspiring example of self-sacrifice I hope to not only be motivated, but to spread that motivation to friends and family, all for the sake of the Mother Earth. It may interest you to know that my humble family, though modest in our contributions at best, strive to recycle all food waste, paper waste, and bodily waste (like hair from hair brushes and drains, finger nail clippings, and any oral effluvia) in our family compost pile. This takes strain off of our dear nation's infrastructure as well as returning to the Mother Earth what was taken from her. My wife is often reluctant to do her duty, but I always remind her that we are in the wrong for consuming and if we don't make sacrifices now, the future of whoever lives on this land after we die out might not be as abundant as our reality was before we sacrificed it for imposed guilt. Continue on in your radical struggle, comrade, and when the time comes to name the traitors, please remember me favorably.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Why doesn't the chart in the article concern you? Let's not get distracted by whether or not someone is correct that downloading 35gb/month of a music has a meaningful effect. That is not the primary issue here.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here.
yongjik 7y ago
There is no way 7kWh/GB is an accurate figure. For example, AWS Oregon region charges you $0.05/GB after the first 150 TB.[1] This page[2] says the current electricity rate of Oregon is 9.8¢/kWh. Assuming AWS is getting electricity at half the price (and making no profit), it can burn 1.02 kWh/GB. The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's not known for being cheap. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/ https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/
- _Microft 7y ago
  The article talks about the cost of transferring a file from the cloud vs loading it from a local harddrive. It's not only the amount of energy used for that at the datacenter, it's also summing up all the fractions of power usage per GB of the used fiber connection, the repeaters on this fiber connection, routers, switches, losses in power supplies, energy required for air conditioning the hardware, the phone/cable/mobile infrastructure that also has switches, repeaters, ... until ones own modem, router and computer at the own location that is needing energy to operate.
- hn23 7y ago
  It really does not matter how much they pay because the market price does not include the actual costs a company imposes on the environment. There is no CO2 Tax, is there? Ask yourself: How can it be more efficient to stream the same stuff over and over again, wasting CPU cycles on couple of fat machines etc. instead of playing it from a local cache (hard drive, ...). IMHO it cannot be more efficient. It is convenient and it appears to be cheap.
  - yongjik 7y ago
    You are right that these companies don't pay the "actual costs" on environmental damage, but that's a separate issue, and not really relevant to the initial claim. If you claim that someone is using 7 kWh or electricity, you had better be prepared to show they actually do. (Besides, consumers don't pay for the environmental cost of building and shipping an SSD from Taiwan, either.) Companies like Amazon may not care about environment, but they care a lot about saving money, and modern computers can handle a surprising amount of connections simultaneously: it's not like those beefy AWS instances are serving just your music.

tjoff 7y ago

Where on earth did you dig up the 7kWh/GB figure from?

_Microft 7y ago
It was mentioned in [0], it's actually the higher one of two different sources (I haven't looked at the sources to be honest because that would require actually finding them which I haven't yet): A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte. [0] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud (2017)
- tjoff 7y ago
  It's an absurd number that can't really be considered as is. Does that include storage for 100 years? Or just the few seconds needed for transfer. Do they count all of the datacenters energy usage as something needed to just transfer and store the data (with no other processing)? Unfortunately that article didn't answer anything.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  Those numbers are way off. The article cites a study claiming 5 kWh here: https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00... It's from 2012 and cites numbers from as long ago as 2009 to determine normalized energy intensity. It also combines different numbers in a way that mean you can't estimate how much energy is saved by downloading a gigabyte to local storage instead of repeatedly streaming it. The single largest energy segment in their estimate is actually desktop computers! And it counts the energy used by CPU-intensive scripts along with the energy required by actual data transfer. Sanity check: Cisco estimates "busy hour" internet traffic at around 3 petabits per second in 2019. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-p... If it took 5 kWh/GB for data transfer during that busy hour, corresponding peak hour electricity use would be in excess of 6.5 terawatts. But that's more electricity than the world can generate in any given hour.
  - hn23 7y ago
    Even if the numbers are way off it is obvious that watching TV or listening music over a packet based protocol is way more energy consuming than any UKW sender can be. UKW scales - streaming does not without more energy because you need more computers.
    - tjoff 7y ago
      UKW?
      - hn23 7y ago
        Ultra Kurzwelle (ultra short radio wave). No idea what the translation to English is.

nroets 7y ago

I'm surprised to hear it takes 7 kWh to transmit 1 GB. My phone consumes only 0.3 kWh a month and I use 1 GB. So the power requirements are very asymmetric.

CondensedBrain 7y ago
That probably factors in the infrastructure it takes to deliver the data.
- _Microft 7y ago
  Yes, it is comparing what it takes to load a file from disk or from remote. It needs to include the share of the used infrastructure for that.

classicsnoot 7y ago

I am in awe, comrade, and from your inspiring example of self-sacrifice I hope to not only be motivated, but to spread that motivation to friends and family, all for the sake of the Mother Earth. It may interest you to know that my humble family, though modest in our contributions at best, strive to recycle all food waste, paper waste, and bodily waste (like hair from hair brushes and drains, finger nail clippings, and any oral effluvia) in our family compost pile. This takes strain off of our dear nation's infrastructure as well as returning to the Mother Earth what was taken from her. My wife is often reluctant to do her duty, but I always remind her that we are in the wrong for consuming and if we don't make sacrifices now, the future of whoever lives on this land after we die out might not be as abundant as our reality was before we sacrificed it for imposed guilt. Continue on in your radical struggle, comrade, and when the time comes to name the traitors, please remember me favorably.

dwaltrip 7y ago
Ok, I'll bite. Why doesn't the chart in the article concern you? Let's not get distracted by whether or not someone is correct that downloading 35gb/month of a music has a meaningful effect. That is not the primary issue here.
dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here.

yongjik 7y ago

There is no way 7kWh/GB is an accurate figure. For example, AWS Oregon region charges you $0.05/GB after the first 150 TB.[1] This page[2] says the current electricity rate of Oregon is 9.8¢/kWh. Assuming AWS is getting electricity at half the price (and making no profit), it can burn 1.02 kWh/GB. The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's not known for being cheap. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/ https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/

_Microft 7y ago
The article talks about the cost of transferring a file from the cloud vs loading it from a local harddrive. It's not only the amount of energy used for that at the datacenter, it's also summing up all the fractions of power usage per GB of the used fiber connection, the repeaters on this fiber connection, routers, switches, losses in power supplies, energy required for air conditioning the hardware, the phone/cable/mobile infrastructure that also has switches, repeaters, ... until ones own modem, router and computer at the own location that is needing energy to operate.
hn23 7y ago
It really does not matter how much they pay because the market price does not include the actual costs a company imposes on the environment. There is no CO2 Tax, is there? Ask yourself: How can it be more efficient to stream the same stuff over and over again, wasting CPU cycles on couple of fat machines etc. instead of playing it from a local cache (hard drive, ...). IMHO it cannot be more efficient. It is convenient and it appears to be cheap.
- yongjik 7y ago
  You are right that these companies don't pay the "actual costs" on environmental damage, but that's a separate issue, and not really relevant to the initial claim. If you claim that someone is using 7 kWh or electricity, you had better be prepared to show they actually do. (Besides, consumers don't pay for the environmental cost of building and shipping an SSD from Taiwan, either.) Companies like Amazon may not care about environment, but they care a lot about saving money, and modern computers can handle a surprising amount of connections simultaneously: it's not like those beefy AWS instances are serving just your music.