ON DECRYPT
The World Climate Summit, at the United Nations headquarters in New York, brought together countries from around the world, but there was one major international player missing: 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.
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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.
Internet consumption doubles every four years
A simple Internet query consumes as much energy as a lit lamp for 17 seconds. Google confirms this figure. An email sent with a file is like turning on a lamp for an hour. The worst are of course the videos that account for 80% of the traffic, and the numbers continue to grow because we always watch more videos 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.
The giants of the Web 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 two billion dollars in wind turbines and solar panels, a power of 1,600 megawatts, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor and a half, just to cool his servers. Still, we do not talk much, because nobody wants to give up the Internet. We are all a bit hypocritical about this, because we accept the limit to give up the plane but it is much more difficult to give up his cell phone.