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How Much Electricity Does It Take to Run the Web?
US Infrastructure (magazine) decided to examine the stats, and then put together the beautiful inforgraphic above illustrating how many servers there are in the world, how much electricity they use, and how much that power costs.
The quick facts:
- Between 2000 and 2005, the amount of energy consumed by data centers and servers doubled worldwide.
- Data centers account for 1.5 percent of all electricity consumption in the U.S., which is more than the combined total used by televisions across the country.
- The electricity to run these servers cost $4.5 billion a year worldwide. Add in the necessary infrastructure (such as cooling) to run these centers and the bill jumps to $7.2
There is worry, though, that this energy usage could double again in five years if steps aren't taken to increase efficiency of cooling measures and if older, more power hungry servers aren't swapped out aggressively for new, greener models.
Check out the full-sized image at the read link. [From: US Infrastructure, Via: psfk]
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Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsSanskritOct 22nd 2009 9:44AM
wow.
CKOct 22nd 2009 10:33AM
it is obvious that all this computing power is a MAJOR cause of GLOBAL WARMING. The Government must step in now to CONTROL THIS ABUSE and cut internet usage to levels acceptable to the masses.
KarlWOct 22nd 2009 10:50AM
Computing power doesn't cause global warming; polluting electricity generators do. There are plenty of ways to generate electricity without contributing to global warming.
definndesignOct 26th 2009 1:14PM
Global Warming is an Earthly Trend not caused by a bleep like humanity. Do your research and stop listening to Al Gore! You will find the truth.
jeff2590Oct 22nd 2009 1:23PM
I agree with KarlW, There are many ways of making electricity, for the web to run.
JamesOct 23rd 2009 10:00AM
Man there's some horrible grammatical/spelling errors in that infographic :0
mick1e2Oct 23rd 2009 10:04AM
6 billion + people world wide, just over a buck a person, bargin (ok maybe a billion with web access - make that $6/year) oh yeah and a little CO2. Big deal, I spend more than that on petrol a day.
lessthan16charsOct 23rd 2009 12:09PM
Not to mention that this info graphic does little to explain what size data center is being referenced, what type of servers other than the obligatory small, medium, and large.
@CK - Do your own math, come up with your own conclusions vs listening to what somebody else tells you.
Trust me, great leaps and bounds are being made by Intel and AMD daily to try and shrink the die sizes in their fabrication methods, just in the last 5 years alone we have gone from 90nm to 35nm dies, which is leaps and bounds smaller than 10 years ago, what that does for us? generally less power used because the processors are more efficient, heat generated is wasted energy, also because the heat is generated that means bigger AC's are used to cool these data centers.
It isn't the actions of one group of people, its the collective of the entire industry that will bring the change.
Trust me, we are working on it...
lolOct 23rd 2009 1:01PM
So.. 7 billion dollars a year worldwide.. that's like a dollar per person. The average person probably pays over $300 a year, just for access to that network. Considering only 13% of people on Earth have internet access, that works out to 210,000% (or 2100x) mark-up, just to connect to the internet. Obviously this doesn't cover the cost of employees, software, and infrastructure, but it's still interesting.