Hat tip to Chris Harries who put me onto this amazing piece of info. I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages, but with my internet access limited to my smart phone, blogging is difficult, for the time being.
I was prompted to visit this subject because I was asked for a citation for a comment I made on good old facebook that there was not enough renewable energy installed globally to run the internet, let alone doing all the other stuff ‘green people’ think will be achieved using solar and wind. Like making steel without coal, can you believe it? in fact, I was way off the mark…… the internet consumes three times as much energy as renewables produce!
So even before the stuff that goes into making computers and phones and modems and servers and whatever else goes into making our hi-tech lifestyle – like, let us not forget, the very renewables that are assumed by many to power the future – said renewables are again found very wanting…….
The source for this information is Low Tech Magazine, in an article titled Why We Need a Speed Limit for the Internet which starts with:
In terms of energy conservation, the leaps made in energy efficiency by the infrastructure and devices we use to access the internet have allowed many online activities to be viewed as more sustainable than offline.
On the internet, however, advances in energy efficiency have a reverse effect: as the network becomes more energy efficient, its total energy use increases. This trend can only be stopped when we limit the demand for digital communication.
To me, this sounds just like Jevons’ Paradox all over again….. and I’m not surprised either. As I continually go on about, nothing we do is sustainable. I’ve been on the internet ever since its early inception when dial up was as good as it got. And I remember that back then, loading web pages was actually no slower than it is now with high speed broadband. The reason for this is that as speed increased, websites got fatter. A bit like cars, houses, and people have over the past 20 years. Consumption rules, the more the better, the economy needs it!
As websites started loading on advertising, gif files, then flash files, all to keep us all amused, with vast arrays of ever more links and videos and photos and who knows what else is hiding behind all that code, hard drives to store all that stuff got bigger and bigger, more and more RAM was needed, servers got hotter and hotter requiring ever more fans and airconditioning just to keep them cool, etc etc…….
In recent years, the focus has been mostly on the energy use of data centers, which host the computers (the “servers”) that store all information online. However, in comparison, more electricity is used by the combination of end-use devices (the “clients”, such as desktops, laptops and smartphones), the network infrastructure (which transmits digital information between servers and clients), and the manufacturing process of servers, end-use devices, and networking devices.
A second factor that explains the large differences in results is timing. Because the internet infrastructure grows and evolves so fast, results concerning its energy use are only applicable to the year under study. Finally, as with all scientific studies, researcher’s models, methods and assumptions as a base for their calculations vary, and are sometimes biased due to beliefs or conflicts of interest. For example, it won’t surprise anyone that an investigation of the internet’s energy use by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity sees much higher electricity consumption than a report written by the information and communication technology industry itself.
The other large factor is of course the vastly growing number of users. I recently saw an article stating that third world countries are totally bypassing copper wire phone technology and going wirelessly for smart phones.
So how much energy does the internet consume? The article quotes a figure of 8% of total global electricity production, or 1,815 TWh of electricity, a figure which is already three years old as it was calculated in 2012.
If we were to try to power the (2012) internet with pedal-powered generators, each producing 70 watt of electric power, we would need 8.2 billion people pedaling in three shifts of eight hours for 365 days per year. (Electricity consumption of end-use devices is included in these numbers, so the pedalers can use their smartphones or laptops while on the job). Solar or wind power are not much of a solution, either: 1,815 TWh equals three times the electricity supplied by all wind and solar energy plants in 2012, worldwide.
Then you have to ask, which is growing faster, the internet, or renewable generation? Researchers, the article states, estimate that by 2017, the electricity use of the internet will rise to between 2,547 TWh (expected growth scenario) and 3,422 TWh (worst case scenario). If the worst-case scenario materializes, internet-related energy use will almost double in just 5 years time. So how much has renewable energy grown? Well…… it’s almost impossible to find out, because literally every site I’ve searched only quotes installed power, which as anyone reading this must surely know, is not related to energy produced, one iota….. and we should all also know that renewables never produce what they are supposed to, because in order to access funding for manufacturing and installing these devices, their energy production forecasts are always overestimated. Like the Ivanpah solar thermal plant that seems to be producing just 25% of its anticipated output. And this chart below shows just how far renewable energy needs to go before it’s actually effective.
Because smartphones move much of the computational effort (and thus the energy use) from the end-device to the data center, the rapid adoption of smartphones is coupled with the equally rapid growth in cloud-based computer services, which allow users to overcome the memory capacity and processing power limitations of these mobile devices. Because the data processing, and the resulting outcome must be transmitted from the end-use device to the data center and back again, the energy use of the wireless network infrastructure also increases. Classic Jevons Paradox….. Like I keep saying, renewables will never power business as usual.
Damn the Matrix 
Good write-up, Mike.
Just a finer point – I was pulled up for this – the article refers to wind and solar, so when we make the point that “the internet consumes three times as much energy as renewables produce!”, I think that should exclude hydro-electricity. Most hydro-electricity is historic, built up over the past century.
The stark fact remains that internet energy is not only outpacing growth in solar and wind energy output combined, it already consumes some three times the energy, and this shows no sign of stabilising at this point.
IT energy – particularly with the emergence of huge new ‘cloud’ data centres – is growing exponentially at a greater rate than almost any other human endeavour. Oddly this exponential doesn’t get mentioned much when the issue of degrowth is talked about.
Hydro releases so much methane from drowning forests that it is no better than coal fired power I recently read.
Yes, that’s true. It’s another huge blind spot in our public consciousness. Those emissions vary a lot depending on how much forest and soil carbon is drowned and also some dams in tropical areas have a low lifespan owing to siltation. As an illustration of this climate pollution it was estimated by Dr Andrew Blakers of ANU that methane emissions from the proposed Franklin Dam in Tasmania would have equalled the output of a coal fired power station of similar output for 20 years – if my memory serves me correctly.
The new phase of massive dam building on the Mekong River and in other places is being done mainly to cater for the world aluminium industry which is busily gearing up to a new economy of scale. Good bye to any Australian smelters pretty soon.
Another important aspect of hydro-electric power is the effect of climate induced drought on energy output. The El Nino pattern that affected Australia in the previous decade quite dramatically reduced the power output from the Tasmanian dam system to the extent that water levels levels dropped critically, to less than 20 percent of their capacity. At that time up to 25 percent of Tasmania’s electricity was being imported from Victorian coal power stations. As we head into another El Nino pattern things could get even worse… some dam levels are already down to 30 percent of their capacity.
In 2009 Hydro Tasmania came to a conclusion that prevailing conditions had altered so much that it formally downgraded the power output (calculated as Long Term Average Yield) of its hydro-electric system by 10 percent. That is, it wrote off some $800 million dollars worth of generating capacity. Another price of climate change we can say.
The same unreliability is happening in other places. Here’s a recent story from further afield: http://grist.org/business-technology/does-hydropower-make-sense-in-a-warming-world/
There’s no doubt that where there is potential hydro-electric capacity new dams will be built – hydro being the only significant base load renewable power source – but there will be huge associated financial risks as prevailing global weather patterns become increasingly erratic.
And I think back to the days of peddling the Flying Doctor Radio…. can’t call it progress.
The other concept which is in Wikipedia that gives an idea of the enormity of our consumption is the “CMO” Cubic mile of oil. it says we use 1 CMO every 330 days approx. The hydro capacity to generate enough electricity to match that would be 200 dams each the size of China’s 3 Gorges dams! You can tell already it doesn’t compute. We don’t even have enough sites to fit such dams and they take decades to build and our consumption is still growing exponentially. And there’s still another nearly 2 CMO to consider coming from gas and coal etc.
there is new technology to use the earth’s heat for power generation, but it’s still experimental.
All in all, It ain’t gonna happen!
BTW, if we wanted to compete with Mekong aluminium smelting we might just have to eliminate our company taxes which only add costs to doing business. We no longer need taxation to fund Commonwealth expenditure, so taxation is now voluntary on the government’s part.
In this post I made some comments a while ago on the limited ability of hydro-electric systems to cope with climate change, there being two parts to this. Reduced rainfall and runoff itself are causing reduced power output in many hydro-electric systems around the world. Secondly, the drowning of forested river valleys to create new hydro-electric schemes results in significant additional methane emissions.
As if to back this up, here is a story in today’s Conversation. It points to big problems for Tasmania’s power utility, Hydro Tasmania. Its dam levels sit at 30 percent just as we enter perhaps a very long dry El Nino pattern.
See here: https://theconversation.com/praying-for-rain-50085
Note that if the proposed Franklin dam had been built it’s power output would have similarly gone through the floor during El Nino events.
I’m not being anti-hydro here, just adding to the ‘no-free-lunch’ theory. Every turn we try to take to resolve energy dilemmas runs us into more trouble. Damn the matrix indeed.
well…
I can estimate how much energy I personally saved by using internet insead of going somewhere.
[…] anyone, left or right, who has carefully considered the Peak Oil perspective is well aware. This is impossible. td0s is aware, and so he continues explaining “the need for social movements that are […]
I think this again posts to an object of change, not what change we are leading to and how to adapt to it.
Objective very, sure it’s all going to go up, but what for? For what work? Why is the best way to create meaningful experiences, and what will it take to evolve that. We use lots of energy, but mostly for meaningless reasons, to fill a void of disempowermenr. Biit if we are accessing out highest empowerment possible, we would use whatever energy we use as efficiently as possible. So arguing renewables is redundant over using fossil fuels, etc. Adapt culture to sustainable means and see what happens. That’s a much more empowering journey.
[…] Smartphones (smart vehicles, smart roads, smart houses, smart toilets and any other ‘smart’ gadget), computers, televisions, electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, lasers, camera lenses, missiles and numerous other technologies all contain a broad spectrum of rare earth elements (REE’s), without which the production of those gadgets would be utterly impossible (strictly chemically speaking). The production and use of ‘screens’ technology alone, according to Jancovici, consumes one third of all the electricity produced worldwide….. The growth of renewables cannot even keep up with the growth of the internet. […]
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