12 ms·

The internet eats up less energy than you might think

92 points by ctoth 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/CAas5 https://archive.is/CAas5
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Something that the article does not mention is that most of the large cloud providers are committed to 100% renewables when it comes to their energy usage. E.g. Google has been working on this for ages and most / all (?) of their data centers are running on clean energy. Most of the non sustainable energy consumption happens on the consumer side where most of us are dependent on grids that are also shifting to more sustainable energy sources but still have some way to go.
- amelius 5y ago
  Why is "grids" the consumer side?
- adflux 5y ago
  Same for Microsoft, I think they intend to be carbon negative by 2025. And still there's people in the Netherlands complaining that datacentres use up too much of the green energy available in the Netherlands. Truly backwards way of thinking
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > Same for Microsoft, > still there's people in the Netherlands complaining that datacentres use up too much of the green energy available in the Netherlands. Truly backwards way of thinking Analyzing and critiquing the moves a massive monopoly -capitalist entity is ‘backwards‘? This sounds quite un-nuanced. Could you elaborate more what you mean? As it stands it sounds like a naive accelerationist perspective.
    - adflux 5y ago
      It is backwards because companies deciding to go CO2 neutral by using sustainable energy sources are contributing towards the Paris agreement. The same people who are complaining the loudest about the datacentres using green electricity, are the same people who would be complaining about the datacentres using fossils fuels, and the same people who use the services delivered by these datacentres. Companies are facing backlash, yes, for using green energy. How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream It's fundamentally impossible. Capitalism is what brought this ecological madness down on it, because of its shortsighted profit incentives. The very same system cannot fix the problem, because nothing has changed. Pointing out companies who used fossil fuels was intending to allow us as a society to realize we need to reduce consumption/production, not pretend we should shut up and live happily as long as we paint every single polluting thing with a green chemical glowing paint. There is no such thing as green capitalism and there will never be. Consumerism, private property and competition is what destroyed this planet. Whether we go on and destroy new ones (hello Musk, Bezos and other psychopaths) or destroy the capitalist system depends on our understanding of those issues.
        mopsi 5y ago
        I fail to understand why you bring capitalism into this when it's the most efficient way of dealing with pollution, since it has a pricing mechanism for raw materials, pollution taxes, etc. I've lived in the socialism on the USSR and seen what it looked like, it's day and night compared to how free countries deal with pollution. Guess what happens when raw materials are available for free, the economy is inefficient because why bother, and pollution doesn't matter because citizens can't vote anyone else into the office because there's only a single party. China happens. Rivers downstream from textile factories colored with dye-of-the-season, wire fences near cement factories opaque from dust, transport workers spilling diesel fuel into the ground for decades to hide slacking and sub-quota mileage, etc. I've seen it all with my own eyes. When the first Western experts gained access after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were utterly devastated at the scale of environmental pollution. They had never seen anything this bad. The solution to everything had been "dig a ditch and throw it in", and if anyone complained, arrest and beat them until they shut up, or send to a labor camp if they don't. The main problem in the West is similar socialism for the polluters, albeit on a much smaller scale. They get to pollute for very cheap, mostly abroad in China. They should be taxed for what raw materials and their pollution actually costs instead of the current artifically low levels achieved through outsourcing to lawless shithole countries, and environmental damage from their actions would be greatly reduced.
  - unilynx 5y ago
    The biggest problem is them using up billions of government subsidies which were supposed to be used to decarbonise existing energy needs, not attract new ones.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > most of the large cloud providers are committed to 100% renewables I’m very skeptical of this. Until now this narrative has often turned out to be nothing more than corporate greenwashing, without tackling the root causes of the problem or helping shift the underlying systems. Take the example of Microsoft buying up renewable energy in Holland: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y (Nederland als harde schijf | Zondag met [Arjen] Lubach)
- joecool1029 5y ago
  I think it's probably important to point out that while Google may purchase 100% of their energy usage from renewable sources, this does not actually mean the datacenters run on renewable sources: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ I bring this up as renewables are currently supplemental and don't replace base load. Hydro storage isn't available/practical for all regions, nuclear has been deemed too expensive, so it's usually natural gas that slots in.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    > this does not actually mean the datacenters run on renewable sources Yes, this is a problem. Let's say the grid uses 100 imaginary units of power per year. 50% is currently produced through solar and wind. Company A buys 50 units and company B buys 50 units a year, until company A gets a crisis of conscience and decides to go green. They manage to get a deal whereby they pay for a certificate that says that their 50 units is produced through renewables. Great. Company B, however, has customers who care less about green stuff so they just buy energy from the grid and "their" electricity is now just produced from fossil fuels. In this case has anything really changed? It's probably a good thing that Google is buying renewable energy: I expect it raises demand for renewables in some way and it's good politically for companies to compete for green credentials. But it doesn't seem to do that much.
    - maccard 5y ago
      Isn't it worse than that? If both companies purchase 100% renewables from the energy supplier, do they say no to one? I disappointingly found out that my carbon neutral tariff doesn't guarantee a purchase of renewables, it just guarantees that any energy I use that is over their wholesale bought amount of renewable energy will be carbon offset, which is complete crap.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Is the datacenter disconnected from the electric grid? Does it not have huge tanks of petrol to run backup generators? Was the datacenter built from locally-sourced materials? Those are the easy questions. What "renewable" energy does it run and how was it produced? What's the carbox/fossil profile of those energy sources? How long do they need to run, and in what conditions, in order to offset this initial fossil energy invested? Those are the medium-difficulty questions. And as i much as i hate Michael Moore's rhetoric, "Planet of the humans" does a pretty good job of explaining why these questions are important. What is the ecological impact of the cloud? Why do countryside folks have to have their data run across the country just to exchange messages with their neighbors, and what's the impact of that? What's the impact of a song that you downloaded from Youtube (replicated, dedicated centralized infra) instead of Bittorrent (decentralized, already-in-use hardware)? What's the impact of streaming this same song over and over? What's the impact of online advertisement and web trackers? How many people are working in concrete offices in a city in order to maintain that hellish infrastructure? Where does all the sand and minerals come from to build all that infrastructure as well as all the electronics you find in there? Those are the hard questions and when you answer them you'll never fantasize about green capitalism ever again. In case you're interested in such topics, and what to do about it, but can't stand for Michael Moore, i strongly recommend the "End:Civ" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L4ccAJJrrjM https://youtube.com/watch?v=L4ccAJJrrjM
  - brongondwana 5y ago
    The transport of messages across the country or even the globe is, like shipping things around the world in a big boat, surprisingly cheap compared to the cost of the endpoints. You can get a lot of containers on a boat and a lot of bits down an optical fibre. The cost of the crypto on the other hand, that adds up a bit. Also BitTorrent uses a bunch of power on a bunch of endpoint servers which are often less efficient than custom silicon. Tricky to calculate.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I have wondered about this too. They say it is green, but for that to be true due to renewables being intermittent shouldn't there be at least sometimes when there just isn't enough green energy? And thus shouldn't they close or stop getting delivery of energy at these times? Also, how green are their backup power generation? Outside batteries?
- adrianN 5y ago
  Until we have more renewable generation capacity than we need, any Watthour of renewable energy consumed at Google's datacenter is a Watthour of coal consumed somewhere else. All they do is very slightly subsidizing the buildout of more renewable generation capacity.
ppf 5y ago
This article is very light on details. I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume that content. Manufacturing semiconductors is an incredibly energy-intensive (as well as very resource-intensive) process, and product lifecycles are ever-shortening.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment Yes, I’d love to read more about that. i wonder if anyone here has a link to some research that looks at the full-er picture.
  - gelert 5y ago
    This is a good link to start exploring the issue: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of... Low tech magazine has a very definite agenda but I've found their writing really informative and I think they do a good job in raising how enormous an issue this really is.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  > I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. Vendor lock-in is the only difference.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap. > to the networking equipment and data centre servers Sorry i don't have the data at hand, but some people estimated just that. Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity. Those numbers did not count resources/energy for production of the hardware or the infrastructure, only recurring "costs".
beckman466 5y ago
> cloud data centers are operated by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. A quick google search about market share reveals: “AWS has 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19%, Google at 7%, Alibaba Cloud close behind“ Why is Alibaba listed first in the list in the NYT article if American data centers together have 58% market share?
- jarvelov 5y ago
  Seems like they listed them in alphabetical order for some reason.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    Ah yes now I see it, thanks. It still seems a weird decision
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Alphabetical is one of the more neutral ways to list names and companies.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  The list is alphabetical
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
beckman466 5y ago
I see today’s internet as it is discussed in this article and in public discourse in general (with blockchain and all) as a massive black box dragon that has grown completely out of control and is now literally devouring the world. [1] Another radically cooperative alternative is starting to emerge: fully agent centric networks, where modular and transparent app logic/functions validate and share the information that is important to a specific network of peers. Combine that with the exciting work of Mikorizal and Sensorica, which turn the model of Enterprise Resource Planning upside down (or as they describe it: “merging REA [the Resources Event Agent accounting method] with some ideas from Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) , Work Flow Management (WFM) and Constraint-Based Scheduling (CBS) systems” [2]), to create ‘Network Resource Planning’ systems and ‘Open Value Networks‘. In other words: they are re-rooting economic networks for the digital age in a way that “enable[s the] internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups.“ By focusing on protocols instead of platforms, a more balanced and horizontal web of trust and transparency can emerge. The most exciting projects in the dWeb for me, that I mentioned above, are: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws + holo-REA and holochain. [1] https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/ https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capit... [2] http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html
CyberRabbi 5y ago
Government should start legislating that non-renewable energy companies must gradually raise their prices to a level such that demand is decreased to a sustainable level. That would be an easy thing for them to do and the outcome is a must if it’s for the survival of the planet. Does anyone know why this policy has not been implemented?
- adrianN 5y ago
  It is gaining popularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
- cowvin 5y ago
  The government typically doesn't mandate companies set their prices to a certain level. Instead, they add taxes that then raise the price of the item. For example, there's already a gasoline tax.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    Typically no but they have the authority to do so and this isn’t a typical situation.
dougSF70 5y ago
I think it still eats up a ton (technical term) of unnecessary energy as we have moved from owning physical objects to digital copies of the same thing. For example music, video, etc. Before 2000 you only needed electricity to play content not store it. This question is : did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Given the absence of scarcity of digital music I would hazard a guess that the number of people that can own a spotify track vs the physical track is so much greater that the energy requirements are exponentially larger.
- extra88 5y ago
  > did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Replace “electricity” with “energy” and yes, the manufacturing and distribution of physical media likely does exceed that required for digital only over a lifetime. The details vary, storing and playing files on your phone is more efficient than doing so from a magnetic drive in a desktop computer and more than streaming it over the Internet on every play.
  - dougSF70 5y ago
    On a per song basis you are probably correct but on a total volume basis, more people have the opportunity to download and store their own copy of [insert album] vs the limited pressing of the actual physical copy of the album/cd. Per song the lifetime energy costs are lower but with a higher installed base , is it marginal?
floatboth 5y ago
> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry Pis around the world. And the trustlessness is dodgy anyway, with a few big mining pools having over 51% of the mining, with everyone basically having to trust the developers, etc.
- sneak 5y ago
  Neither the miners nor the developers control bitcoin's consensus. The stability of bitcoin is the tyranny of the installed base. Even non-mining nodes will not relay invalid blocks that break the fundamental rules. See also: Ethereum Classic, a case study in developer-as-dictator
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of Bitcoin at all but that argument could be used for anything - "what's aggravating is that cars are literally moved by the consumption of power through wasting it on combustion in the engine", "what's aggravating is that computers are literally operated by the consumption of power to waste it on browsing HN", "what's aggravating is that TV images are literally sent by the consumption of power through wasting it on radio waves" and so on. The only case it seems like a waste is if you don't value the output. If someone values browsing HN, individual transport, watching TV, or distributed consensus then it's not wasted it was used. Inefficient perhaps, but the energy use was intentional for a value to someone not discarded for no gain.
  - ufo 5y ago
    Not at all! Bitcoin is not just inefficient, it is purposefully inefficient on a colossal scale. By design, all the energy is turned into waste heat.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
theden 5y ago
I don't think people generally think the internet as a network was wasting energy. I tend to think it's mainly the mass amount of commoditised hardware that's the problem, especially if it's thrown away and not recycled, and recently hoarded for mining.
crazygringo 5y ago
> From 2010 to 2018, the data workloads hosted by the cloud data centers increased 2,600... But energy consumption for all data centers rose less than 10 percent... What happened, the authors explain, was mainly a huge shift of workloads to the bigger, more efficient cloud data centers — and away from traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies... “The big cloud providers displaced vastly less efficient corporate data centers,” Mr. Koomey said. This is fascinating, and the first I've heard -- I'm curious if anyone here knows (not just guessing) what the main factors are? Is it economies of scale with power and cooling and construction? Is it massively higher CPU utilization because servers are on-demand? Is it custom-designed equipment? All of the above, or something else? I'd guess that being sited in areas of cheap renewable energy would play a big part too, but if the shift described is solely "energy consumption" then I'm assuming it's treating renewables as the same amount of energy. I know a lot of people here are anti-cloud and pro-hosting your own equipment in your own rack... but I'm now genuinely curious if there's a large environmental difference here.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
News sites love interesting headlines, researchers and university PR departments love being in the news, often much more than they value truth. The easiest way to get impressive research on power consumption is to use old per-unit consumption numbers to extrapolate power consumption based on today's usage (e.g. if transferring 1 GB of data took 1 kWh many years ago, just multiply "GB transferred today" with 1 kWh and claim that's what the Internet/zoom calls/... use) For example: Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021 according to https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/019...], so using 122 EB/month [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...] = 1 464 000 000 000 GB/year = 1.5 PWh in 2017, which would be almost 7% of total power consumption.
- slavik81 5y ago
  > Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021] That should say 2012.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    You're absolutely correct. Sorry, that's a really bad typo :( Too late to edit now.
latchkey 5y ago
"But Bitcoin, the scientists say, is something different — and a worry. The efficiency trends elsewhere in tech are blunted because Bitcoin’s specialized software churns through ever more computing cycles as more people try to create, buy and sell digital currency." No, increased Bitcoin usage does not increase the amount of energy needed to process transactions. More people are mining (and thus burning more power), because it is a profitable venture if you can get best prices on hardware and lowest costs of electricity. The least expensive electricity in the world happens to be either stolen, stranded, or hydro / geothermal.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gwern 5y ago
Paper: https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2021-koomey.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2021-koomey.pdf

92 points by ctoth 5y ago

https://archive.is/CAas5 https://archive.is/CAas5

Something that the article does not mention is that most of the large cloud providers are committed to 100% renewables when it comes to their energy usage. E.g. Google has been working on this for ages and most / all (?) of their data centers are running on clean energy. Most of the non sustainable energy consumption happens on the consumer side where most of us are dependent on grids that are also shifting to more sustainable energy sources but still have some way to go.

amelius 5y ago
Why is "grids" the consumer side?
adflux 5y ago
Same for Microsoft, I think they intend to be carbon negative by 2025. And still there's people in the Netherlands complaining that datacentres use up too much of the green energy available in the Netherlands. Truly backwards way of thinking
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Same for Microsoft, > still there's people in the Netherlands complaining that datacentres use up too much of the green energy available in the Netherlands. Truly backwards way of thinking Analyzing and critiquing the moves a massive monopoly -capitalist entity is ‘backwards‘? This sounds quite un-nuanced. Could you elaborate more what you mean? As it stands it sounds like a naive accelerationist perspective.
  - adflux 5y ago
    It is backwards because companies deciding to go CO2 neutral by using sustainable energy sources are contributing towards the Paris agreement. The same people who are complaining the loudest about the datacentres using green electricity, are the same people who would be complaining about the datacentres using fossils fuels, and the same people who use the services delivered by these datacentres. Companies are facing backlash, yes, for using green energy. How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream It's fundamentally impossible. Capitalism is what brought this ecological madness down on it, because of its shortsighted profit incentives. The very same system cannot fix the problem, because nothing has changed. Pointing out companies who used fossil fuels was intending to allow us as a society to realize we need to reduce consumption/production, not pretend we should shut up and live happily as long as we paint every single polluting thing with a green chemical glowing paint. There is no such thing as green capitalism and there will never be. Consumerism, private property and competition is what destroyed this planet. Whether we go on and destroy new ones (hello Musk, Bezos and other psychopaths) or destroy the capitalist system depends on our understanding of those issues.
      - mopsi 5y ago
        I fail to understand why you bring capitalism into this when it's the most efficient way of dealing with pollution, since it has a pricing mechanism for raw materials, pollution taxes, etc. I've lived in the socialism on the USSR and seen what it looked like, it's day and night compared to how free countries deal with pollution. Guess what happens when raw materials are available for free, the economy is inefficient because why bother, and pollution doesn't matter because citizens can't vote anyone else into the office because there's only a single party. China happens. Rivers downstream from textile factories colored with dye-of-the-season, wire fences near cement factories opaque from dust, transport workers spilling diesel fuel into the ground for decades to hide slacking and sub-quota mileage, etc. I've seen it all with my own eyes. When the first Western experts gained access after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were utterly devastated at the scale of environmental pollution. They had never seen anything this bad. The solution to everything had been "dig a ditch and throw it in", and if anyone complained, arrest and beat them until they shut up, or send to a labor camp if they don't. The main problem in the West is similar socialism for the polluters, albeit on a much smaller scale. They get to pollute for very cheap, mostly abroad in China. They should be taxed for what raw materials and their pollution actually costs instead of the current artifically low levels achieved through outsourcing to lawless shithole countries, and environmental damage from their actions would be greatly reduced.
- unilynx 5y ago
  The biggest problem is them using up billions of government subsidies which were supposed to be used to decarbonise existing energy needs, not attract new ones.
beckman466 5y ago
> most of the large cloud providers are committed to 100% renewables I’m very skeptical of this. Until now this narrative has often turned out to be nothing more than corporate greenwashing, without tackling the root causes of the problem or helping shift the underlying systems. Take the example of Microsoft buying up renewable energy in Holland: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y (Nederland als harde schijf | Zondag met [Arjen] Lubach)
joecool1029 5y ago
I think it's probably important to point out that while Google may purchase 100% of their energy usage from renewable sources, this does not actually mean the datacenters run on renewable sources: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ I bring this up as renewables are currently supplemental and don't replace base load. Hydro storage isn't available/practical for all regions, nuclear has been deemed too expensive, so it's usually natural gas that slots in.
- chimprich 5y ago
  > this does not actually mean the datacenters run on renewable sources Yes, this is a problem. Let's say the grid uses 100 imaginary units of power per year. 50% is currently produced through solar and wind. Company A buys 50 units and company B buys 50 units a year, until company A gets a crisis of conscience and decides to go green. They manage to get a deal whereby they pay for a certificate that says that their 50 units is produced through renewables. Great. Company B, however, has customers who care less about green stuff so they just buy energy from the grid and "their" electricity is now just produced from fossil fuels. In this case has anything really changed? It's probably a good thing that Google is buying renewable energy: I expect it raises demand for renewables in some way and it's good politically for companies to compete for green credentials. But it doesn't seem to do that much.
  - maccard 5y ago
    Isn't it worse than that? If both companies purchase 100% renewables from the energy supplier, do they say no to one? I disappointingly found out that my carbon neutral tariff doesn't guarantee a purchase of renewables, it just guarantees that any energy I use that is over their wholesale bought amount of renewable energy will be carbon offset, which is complete crap.
southerntofu 5y ago
Is the datacenter disconnected from the electric grid? Does it not have huge tanks of petrol to run backup generators? Was the datacenter built from locally-sourced materials? Those are the easy questions. What "renewable" energy does it run and how was it produced? What's the carbox/fossil profile of those energy sources? How long do they need to run, and in what conditions, in order to offset this initial fossil energy invested? Those are the medium-difficulty questions. And as i much as i hate Michael Moore's rhetoric, "Planet of the humans" does a pretty good job of explaining why these questions are important. What is the ecological impact of the cloud? Why do countryside folks have to have their data run across the country just to exchange messages with their neighbors, and what's the impact of that? What's the impact of a song that you downloaded from Youtube (replicated, dedicated centralized infra) instead of Bittorrent (decentralized, already-in-use hardware)? What's the impact of streaming this same song over and over? What's the impact of online advertisement and web trackers? How many people are working in concrete offices in a city in order to maintain that hellish infrastructure? Where does all the sand and minerals come from to build all that infrastructure as well as all the electronics you find in there? Those are the hard questions and when you answer them you'll never fantasize about green capitalism ever again. In case you're interested in such topics, and what to do about it, but can't stand for Michael Moore, i strongly recommend the "End:Civ" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L4ccAJJrrjM https://youtube.com/watch?v=L4ccAJJrrjM
- brongondwana 5y ago
  The transport of messages across the country or even the globe is, like shipping things around the world in a big boat, surprisingly cheap compared to the cost of the endpoints. You can get a lot of containers on a boat and a lot of bits down an optical fibre. The cost of the crypto on the other hand, that adds up a bit. Also BitTorrent uses a bunch of power on a bunch of endpoint servers which are often less efficient than custom silicon. Tricky to calculate.
Ekaros 5y ago
I have wondered about this too. They say it is green, but for that to be true due to renewables being intermittent shouldn't there be at least sometimes when there just isn't enough green energy? And thus shouldn't they close or stop getting delivery of energy at these times? Also, how green are their backup power generation? Outside batteries?
adrianN 5y ago
Until we have more renewable generation capacity than we need, any Watthour of renewable energy consumed at Google's datacenter is a Watthour of coal consumed somewhere else. All they do is very slightly subsidizing the buildout of more renewable generation capacity.

ppf 5y ago

This article is very light on details. I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume that content. Manufacturing semiconductors is an incredibly energy-intensive (as well as very resource-intensive) process, and product lifecycles are ever-shortening.

beckman466 5y ago
> It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment Yes, I’d love to read more about that. i wonder if anyone here has a link to some research that looks at the full-er picture.
- gelert 5y ago
  This is a good link to start exploring the issue: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of... Low tech magazine has a very definite agenda but I've found their writing really informative and I think they do a good job in raising how enormous an issue this really is.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. Vendor lock-in is the only difference.
southerntofu 5y ago
> "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap. > to the networking equipment and data centre servers Sorry i don't have the data at hand, but some people estimated just that. Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity. Those numbers did not count resources/energy for production of the hardware or the infrastructure, only recurring "costs".

beckman466 5y ago

> cloud data centers are operated by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. A quick google search about market share reveals: “AWS has 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19%, Google at 7%, Alibaba Cloud close behind“ Why is Alibaba listed first in the list in the NYT article if American data centers together have 58% market share?

jarvelov 5y ago
Seems like they listed them in alphabetical order for some reason.
- beckman466 5y ago
  Ah yes now I see it, thanks. It still seems a weird decision
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Alphabetical is one of the more neutral ways to list names and companies.
Swenrekcah 5y ago
The list is alphabetical
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

beckman466 5y ago

I see today’s internet as it is discussed in this article and in public discourse in general (with blockchain and all) as a massive black box dragon that has grown completely out of control and is now literally devouring the world. [1] Another radically cooperative alternative is starting to emerge: fully agent centric networks, where modular and transparent app logic/functions validate and share the information that is important to a specific network of peers. Combine that with the exciting work of Mikorizal and Sensorica, which turn the model of Enterprise Resource Planning upside down (or as they describe it: “merging REA [the Resources Event Agent accounting method] with some ideas from Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) , Work Flow Management (WFM) and Constraint-Based Scheduling (CBS) systems” [2]), to create ‘Network Resource Planning’ systems and ‘Open Value Networks‘. In other words: they are re-rooting economic networks for the digital age in a way that “enable[s the] internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups.“ By focusing on protocols instead of platforms, a more balanced and horizontal web of trust and transparency can emerge. The most exciting projects in the dWeb for me, that I mentioned above, are: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws + holo-REA and holochain. [1] https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/ https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capit... [2] http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html http://www.jeffsutherland.org/oopsla97/haugen.html

CyberRabbi 5y ago

Government should start legislating that non-renewable energy companies must gradually raise their prices to a level such that demand is decreased to a sustainable level. That would be an easy thing for them to do and the outcome is a must if it’s for the survival of the planet. Does anyone know why this policy has not been implemented?

adrianN 5y ago
It is gaining popularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
cowvin 5y ago
The government typically doesn't mandate companies set their prices to a certain level. Instead, they add taxes that then raise the price of the item. For example, there's already a gasoline tax.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  Typically no but they have the authority to do so and this isn’t a typical situation.

dougSF70 5y ago

I think it still eats up a ton (technical term) of unnecessary energy as we have moved from owning physical objects to digital copies of the same thing. For example music, video, etc. Before 2000 you only needed electricity to play content not store it. This question is : did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Given the absence of scarcity of digital music I would hazard a guess that the number of people that can own a spotify track vs the physical track is so much greater that the energy requirements are exponentially larger.

extra88 5y ago
> did the production of a vinyl record / cd use more electricity than a lifetime of storage of its modern day digital equivalent? Replace “electricity” with “energy” and yes, the manufacturing and distribution of physical media likely does exceed that required for digital only over a lifetime. The details vary, storing and playing files on your phone is more efficient than doing so from a magnetic drive in a desktop computer and more than streaming it over the Internet on every play.
- dougSF70 5y ago
  On a per song basis you are probably correct but on a total volume basis, more people have the opportunity to download and store their own copy of [insert album] vs the limited pressing of the actual physical copy of the album/cd. Per song the lifetime energy costs are lower but with a higher installed base , is it marginal?

floatboth 5y ago

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry Pis around the world. And the trustlessness is dodgy anyway, with a few big mining pools having over 51% of the mining, with everyone basically having to trust the developers, etc.

sneak 5y ago
Neither the miners nor the developers control bitcoin's consensus. The stability of bitcoin is the tyranny of the installed base. Even non-mining nodes will not relay invalid blocks that break the fundamental rules. See also: Ethereum Classic, a case study in developer-as-dictator
zamadatix 5y ago
I'm not a fan of Bitcoin at all but that argument could be used for anything - "what's aggravating is that cars are literally moved by the consumption of power through wasting it on combustion in the engine", "what's aggravating is that computers are literally operated by the consumption of power to waste it on browsing HN", "what's aggravating is that TV images are literally sent by the consumption of power through wasting it on radio waves" and so on. The only case it seems like a waste is if you don't value the output. If someone values browsing HN, individual transport, watching TV, or distributed consensus then it's not wasted it was used. Inefficient perhaps, but the energy use was intentional for a value to someone not discarded for no gain.
- ufo 5y ago
  Not at all! Bitcoin is not just inefficient, it is purposefully inefficient on a colossal scale. By design, all the energy is turned into waste heat.
  - zamadatix 5y ago

theden 5y ago

I don't think people generally think the internet as a network was wasting energy. I tend to think it's mainly the mass amount of commoditised hardware that's the problem, especially if it's thrown away and not recycled, and recently hoarded for mining.

crazygringo 5y ago

> From 2010 to 2018, the data workloads hosted by the cloud data centers increased 2,600... But energy consumption for all data centers rose less than 10 percent... What happened, the authors explain, was mainly a huge shift of workloads to the bigger, more efficient cloud data centers — and away from traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies... “The big cloud providers displaced vastly less efficient corporate data centers,” Mr. Koomey said. This is fascinating, and the first I've heard -- I'm curious if anyone here knows (not just guessing) what the main factors are? Is it economies of scale with power and cooling and construction? Is it massively higher CPU utilization because servers are on-demand? Is it custom-designed equipment? All of the above, or something else? I'd guess that being sited in areas of cheap renewable energy would play a big part too, but if the shift described is solely "energy consumption" then I'm assuming it's treating renewables as the same amount of energy. I know a lot of people here are anti-cloud and pro-hosting your own equipment in your own rack... but I'm now genuinely curious if there's a large environmental difference here.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

News sites love interesting headlines, researchers and university PR departments love being in the news, often much more than they value truth. The easiest way to get impressive research on power consumption is to use old per-unit consumption numbers to extrapolate power consumption based on today's usage (e.g. if transferring 1 GB of data took 1 kWh many years ago, just multiply "GB transferred today" with 1 kWh and claim that's what the Internet/zoom calls/... use) For example: Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021 according to https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/019...], so using 122 EB/month [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...] = 1 464 000 000 000 GB/year = 1.5 PWh in 2017, which would be almost 7% of total power consumption.

slavik81 5y ago
> Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021] That should say 2012.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  You're absolutely correct. Sorry, that's a really bad typo :( Too late to edit now.

latchkey 5y ago

"But Bitcoin, the scientists say, is something different — and a worry. The efficiency trends elsewhere in tech are blunted because Bitcoin’s specialized software churns through ever more computing cycles as more people try to create, buy and sell digital currency." No, increased Bitcoin usage does not increase the amount of energy needed to process transactions. More people are mining (and thus burning more power), because it is a profitable venture if you can get best prices on hardware and lowest costs of electricity. The least expensive electricity in the world happens to be either stolen, stranded, or hydro / geothermal.

deleted 5y ago
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gwern 5y ago

Paper: https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2021-koomey.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2021-koomey.pdf