If the Internet were a country, it would be the third largest polluter on the planet, after China and the United States. The problem is that no one wants to give up watching shows on Netflix or Videos on YouTube.
There is a big missing person at the World Climate Summit in New York, it's the Internet. If the Internet were a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity on the planet behind China and the United States.
The figures vary a lot, but the Internet represents between 7% and 15% of the world's electricity consumption. The CNRS gives it the figure of 10%.
Everything pollutes, be it the computer and the submarine cables, to the big Internet server where the emails and the videos are stored and that must be cooled constantly.
Some elements of comparison?
A simple query on the Internet is as much energy as a lamp lit for 17 seconds. Google confirms this figure.
An email sent with a file is a lamp lit for one hour.
The worst is of course the videos that account for 80% of the traffic, the numbers are exploding because we always watch more video or movies on the Internet.
For France alone, 47 billion videos were viewed on YouTube in the first half, an increase of 32% over one year.
Consumption doubles every four years, so the Internet will quickly become the world's largest consumer of energy.
Why do not we talk about it more? This is a huge problem on the horizon for the giants of the web.
They are well aware that they have a big problem in front of them and so do not stop investing to have clean electricity.
Last Friday, Google invested $ 2 billion in wind turbines and solar panels, a power of 1,600 megawatts, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor and a half just to cool its servers.
We do not talk about it because nobody wants to give up the Internet.
We are all a bit hypocritical about this, we accept the limit to give up the plane but give up his cell phone, no question.