5 ms·
> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", S
by ben_w 6mo ago
> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point.
2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so.
Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer).
(As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).
- Schiendelman 6mo agoYou think the energy cost to transfer has dropped by 10 X in eight years? Why?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo agoSeems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.
- ben_w 6mo agoLong term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it. EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.
- Schiendelman 6mo agoI can see a reduction of maybe 10% over 10 years on a per byte basis. My actual bet is that it's even. For every proposed reduction there's a new load balancing layer, a higher energy wireless standard…
- radicalbyte 6mo agoEight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.
- b40d-48b2-979e 6mo agoEight years ago, your ISP was already on light over glass, they just didn't serve it that way to your house.
- radicalbyte 6mo agoWhen I was living in the UK the copper cable was 4.5km long. The reason I know that is because BT denied that there was any copper line installed. So I spoke to the building company who told me they installed the copper cables. Then I wrote a letter to my MP. With his help we got BT to conceed and they hooked us up. It was bad DSL but bad DSL is better than a 56k modem. Nowadays DSL lines are anything from a few 100 meters to 1.5 - 2 kilometers. I don't know much about cable TV.
- ChrisRR 6mo agoBut processing and retranssmission of the data at every network node still takes energy
- Schiendelman 6mo agoAnd plenty of that hardware is more than ten years old.
- Azkron 6mo agoAgreed. Also, complaining about the climate impact of an AI model download while opening your post with an ai generated image is peak hypocrisy. Did not bother to read the rest.
- kingstnap 6mo ago0.04 to 0.1 kWh/GB is insane even for 2018 lol. I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.
- bastawhiz 6mo agoClearly you're charging an EV to drive a jar of microsd cards with your data back and forth
- gbgarbeb 6mo ago1.8 to 4.5 kW.
- rightbyte 6mo agoI'd guess there is some offset power needed for keeping a "line" open. Like, 200 kB/s is not twice the power of 100?
- wtallis 6mo agoWhen looking at the power consumption across the whole network path and not just a single link, most of the power draw is probably baseline static power costs of keeping all the routers and switches running. Which means that judging the impact of a download in terms of Watts per MB/s is a pretty bad way of analyzing this.
- jazzypants 6mo agoThis is the same guy who said that Claude Code was spyware because it makes a few Windows Registry keys [0]. I find it really hard to take him seriously. [0] https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/ https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
- ben_w 6mo agoOh, one of those people. Gotcha. Back in the early days of my career (can't remember exactly, possibly 2010?) I tried making screensavers and gave them away on my website, someone followed me directly on twitter then tweeted to everyone that my screensavers were some kind of malware because… I'd named the main class as per the tutorial and somehow this looked scary.
- fluoridation 6mo agoMain class? Tutorial? I feel like you're leaving out important details.
- ben_w 6mo agoNot really important, but if you're interested, I followed some tutorial on how to make a MacOS screensaver back in the Objective-C days. MyMainWindow or something, IDK, it was 16 years ago and I lost track of the source code since then.