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

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.