Computer scientists have calculated what share of the global energy consumption for the account comes from the internet. The research, where a lot of assumptions being passed on to, comes out on a share of 1.5 percent.
The researchers, Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan, affiliated with the University of California and the International Computer Science Institute, looked not only to the consumption of electricity, but also to the embodied energy or emergy. This refers to the energy that is required for the construction of the devices and the infrastructure that is part of the internet part. The final conclusion is that the power consumption somewhere between 170 and 307 gigawatts fluctuates. This would use a minimum of 1.1 percent and a maximum of 1.9 percent of the 16 terawatts that the mankind used.
The duo based the numbers of devices on previous studies and assumed that currently 750 million laptops, eight desktops, a billion smartphones and hundreds of million servers in circulation. Also the consumption and the emergy of associated hardware, such as routers, switches and fiber – optic and copper wires were taken into account. In the study, the two from a vervangingstijd of two years for a smartphone to thirty years for koperinfrastructuur.
“As far as we know, this is the first holistic estimation of the energy consumption of the internet”, say Ma and Raghavan. “Although we are sure that our conclusion is not correct, we hope that there is more awareness about this important topic.”
