The Internet, 25 years on

What does a resident and the average RL Brazilian have in common? Incredibly, they both use the same amount of electricity.

It is may not be a fair example, as the average resident isn’t active all the time, but it does show how the time we spend online affects the environment.

Providing energy to run the internet needs the equivalent of 14 power stations, which in turn cough out the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions as the airline industry.

Vast farms of servers are used to power the internet, and it is these gas-guzzling data centres of immense size and energy consumption that drive SL and the entire internet.

Siegfried Behrendt, a researcher at Berlin’s IZT institute, calculates that downloading his daily newspaper uses the same amount of electricity as running a washing machine.

German IT firm Strato reckons that looking for something on Google requires as much energy as an energy-efficient light-bulb uses in an hour.

At this rate, in less than 25 years the internet will consume as much energy as the whole of humanity does today.

IBM wants to capture the heat produced by data centres and use it to power air-conditioning. An excellent move.