April 23, 2011

E-Shocker: IT companies and Internet consume are the biggest energy consumers

by madhulika

Consider this: A single spam email of the 62 trillion sent each year creates 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide. A Google search for “Soylent Green” spawns the same amount as driving a car three inches. Or, Electricity used to power searches on Google, each month produces 260,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide and is enough to power a freezer for 5,400 years. Searches use up 3.9 million kilowatt-hours, an equivalent of 5 million loads of laundry.

Shocking? More of devastating, if you calculate the rate at which the one streamed video of a cricket match, searchers, tweets are depleting the earth resources. But its true. According to a recently released report about Cloud Computing from Greenpeace, computer servers account for about 2% of global energy demand, growing about 12% a year, an equivalent of the power consumed by 50,000 U.S. homes.
And it isnt just small computer companies, but also 10 tech biggies like Apple, Amazon and Twitter who add to this exploitation as they use non-renewable resources such as coal to power their services. In fact according to Wordstream , an internet marketing company, in 2005 U.S. 10.3 million data centers gobbled up enough energy to power all of Britain for two months.
Of course, companies like Google and Yahoo are doing their bit by using cleaner, renewable resources, but Greenpeace experts says that isnt enough.
Too bad that we had to use one such source to tell you this. Hopefully there will find a better alternative.
[LATimesblogs]