Will It Now Be Green To Shun The Internet?

One should make investments in more efficient data centers, and this requires
the revenues generated by robust demand.

Internet usage is growing and is now recognized to have a measurable impact
on global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Global Internet traffic is estimated to be growing at around 50-60 percent
each year, with the current comprising of only a quarter of the world's
population. There is a lot more growth in user numbers and traffic volumes to
come in the future, as new users come online in Africa, Asia, the Middle East
and South America.

This growth scenario is starting to attract attention in terms of the energy
inputs and outputs of the massive data centers that power the Internet. The
simple, and apparently benign, act of initiating an online search, updating a
blog or chatting on a social network inevitably causes servers to heat up a
little bit more in a data center somewhere — and a power station to spew out
more CO2 to generate the electricity.

Researchers are now starting to attempt to quantify the energy impact of
Internet usage, with Google being pointed as an obvious target. A Harvard
University researcher estimated that a Google search generates something like 7g
of CO2. Google engineers rebut this with an estimate of 0.2g.

Dr Steve Hodgkinson

The science of this measure­ment is 'imprecise' but let's put it in
perspective. A small car generates something like 100g of CO2/km, so a Google
search is equivalent to driving a small car between 2 and 70m.

Many people avoid using cars to minimize their CO2 footprint so, using the
same logic, should we also now shun the Internet to protect the planet?

The IT industry should look to increase supply-side energy efficiency.

Making people aware of the energy impact of their daily activities is a
useful thing. After all, no individual raindrop is responsible for the flood,
yet their cumula­tive effect can be disastrous.

However, stifling demand for the Internet should not be seen as a solution to
Internet data center energy consumption until we have made more progress on at
least three areas of supply-side energy efficiency.

The first is power usage efficiency (PUE). The US Environ­mental Protection
Agency's 2007 study revealed that the historical PUE of data centers was
observed to be around 2-meaning that half of the energy that flows into a data
center is wasted in such things as power conversions, cooling and lighting
before being applied to useful computing work. State-of-the-art data center
enginee­ring and server consolidation/virtualization strategies can see PUE
reduce to 1.2 and below, but this requires investment in refurbishing legacy
data centers and server farms and in new operational practices.

The second is low energy proportionality of the current suite of computing
technologies. Reducing demand by 10 percent does not necessarily lead to a 10
percent reduction in energy consumption. CPUs and RAM chips consume power even
when idle. Disk drives spin regardless of data traffic. There is a lot of R&D
underway to improve the energy proportion­ality of data centers, but the reality
today is that reducing demand does not necessarily lead to lower CO2 emissions.

The third is the often hyped 'green energy'-connecting data centers to solar,
wind or geothermal power to replace coal fired generation.

But there is the 'Catch 22'. Robust demand is required to generate revenues
to fund investment in the more energy efficient technologies required to
actually reduce global data center CO2 emissions. Too much hype around the CO2
cost of Internet usage may well lead to people choosing to shun the Internet,
starving companies of the traffic-related revenues needed to actually solve the
problem. Perhaps it will be better to just suggest that people turn their
computers off when they are not being used.

The author is Research Director, Ovum