23 Musings

If you've ever wondered that, here's your answer:

I've estimated the electricity consumption for the internet as follows:

US:    350 billion kWh per year

World: 868 billion kWh per year


These numbers represent 9.4% of total US electricity consumption, and 5.3%
of global electricity consumption.


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The breakout of the data is as follows:


Annual Electricity Use for the Internet--US and World


Category..........................US Consumption.......World Consumption
.....................................Billion kWh........Billion kWh

(1) Data Centers (includes cooling)......45.................112.5


(2) PCs&Monitors........................235.................588


(3) Modems/routers/etc...................67.................167


(4) Phone network.......................0.4...................1.0


TOTAL ELECTRICITY DEMAND        ~350 billion kWh       ~868 billion
OF THE INTERNET ........................U.S.................World

Crikey! That's a lot of power! Time to look for better more sustainable power supplies for PC's? Perhaps we could all sit at our desks pedaling while we surf...

Very interesting post on GigaOM today regarding Sun Microsystems. Sun have developed a new approach to computing on demand aimed at corporates who require that little bit of extra power on demand. They've put a data center codenamed 'Project Blackbox' in a standard 20ft shipping container which can be delivered to any site which has electricity, chilled water and an internet connection.

The system can contain up to seven racks of 35 servers based on either Sun’s Niagara Sparc processor or an Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, so that's a pretty powerful set up! Using a new cooling system Sun say this can solve the costly problem of data centers that use a lot of space in expensive areas and enable corporates to move their data centers out of the city into cheaper areas easily and with very little land costs.

Google was rumoured to have been working on a plan to stuff as much computing power into a container sized area as possible, perhaps this is the fruition of the experiement?

Great idea anyway, we pay a fortune for secure data center space and a system like this would certainly be of interest.