Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Power Hungry
February 15, 2007 1:48 PM
Follow this for a second: the computer servers that keep the Internet running now use more electricity than the entire state of Mississippi.
That's the catchphrase coming from a study led by Jonathan Koomey, a scientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford, who did his research for Advanced Micro Devices, the computer-chip manufacturer.
Koomey's group says Internet servers consume 1.2 percent of the nation's electric power. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound like much, but it's a number that doubled in the five years from 2000 to 2005. It has companies worried; the nation's power grid is already overburdened.
You can read more HERE and HERE. Koomey et al are given credit for doing the first reliable calculation of how much power the net consumes. (It also helps knock down some myths; there was an old number that suggested the Internet was drinking 13 percent of our power supply, and causing the west-coast power crises of a few years ago.)
Are these numbers necessarily a bad thing? No, say many engineers--if you're going online to get information, the energy it takes is probably a lot less than if you have to travel somewhere for it. But it does cost money--about $2.7 billion in 2005, says Koomey, and growing.
February 15, 2007 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (6)
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Since increasing numbers of people have been using computers (and presumably going on the internet) during the period of 2000-2005, it stands to reason that the power consumption of servers--the backbone of the internet--would also increase. I appreciate the counsel of the Hewlett-Packard researcher quoted in the last of your links, stating that the question of power consumption must be examined "holistically" in context from the individual servers to the data centers they're in to the climate controls of those data centers. I think it nearly impossible and highly illogical to isolate server power consumption from the centers those servers are located in.
Posted by: chuck | Feb 15, 2007 3:06:43 PM
So Al Gore is contributing more to our "problem". After all he invented the internet...
Posted by: Robert | Feb 15, 2007 7:35:11 PM
We better shut down the web right now! After all no good comes from it. Of course we might be able to get rid of the Koomey's of the world and save all the energy they waste
on heating the air that they spout.
Posted by: 9ball | Feb 15, 2007 9:01:49 PM
If there ever was an entity that is decentralized enough to warrant use of solar power, it's the internet. With the wide use of fiberoptics, powering individual servers with solar cells would make the drain disappear from the grid. Convincing homeowners to follow suit would be a little more difficult, but not impossible. But to decry the internet for it's power consumption is madness. The internet is probably the best thing since the Library at Alexandria.
Posted by: Andy | Feb 16, 2007 10:00:25 AM
Note from Ned--
9ball and Robert, I got a kick out of your posts. I should say that this was a legit study, done mostly because large companies are worried about their costs. They're footing that $2.7 billion bill, and presumably passing it on to the rest of us.
One extra nugget Koomey's group found: most of the growth in Internet traffic in recent years is from small servers--the smaller web sites people are hosting on their own. One more sign of how the web is democratic with a small "d."
--NP
Posted by: Ned Potter | Feb 16, 2007 11:26:08 AM
Actually, there is a great solution to this problem.
A large percentage of a servers power consumption comes from the harddrives which spin 24x7x365.
We need to continue developing solid state drives which have no moving parts. This should drop electrical consumption quite a bit.
We may also need to start being more careful about how much disk space our applications use. Log files probably don't need to be left until they are 10 gigs.
Posted by: Matt Baker | Feb 16, 2007 1:22:14 PM
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