Internet Offsets Carbon Footprint

I kept reading information on the Internet and it's carbon footprint. I discovered this article on CNET.COM: "High-speed Internet helps cool the planet" where they posted that the World would be spared of 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases withing a decade if the broadband access were used more. They also pointed out that if almost everyone in the World used high-speed internet, we could cut the equivalent of 11% of oil imports to the U.S. each year (big number, huh?)

The ways the said high-speed internet could help is:

1. Telecommuting (e-work, etc): 588 million tons / year.

2. E-Commerce: 206 million tons /year.

3. Teleconferencing - could bring 1/10 of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons / year.

4. Downloading music, videos, books, newspaper (saves packaging, paper, shipping): 67 million tons / year. 

But they also talk about the trade-off I mentioned in my previous reply.

** Data taken from the CNET article mentioned above. 

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your post. I think that Bill's idea is a nice one but I see limited potential with using rewards to generate change. If we used another example, I wonder how effective the carpool lane has been in getting people to carpool. The carpool lane could be seen as a reward, the ability to get to work faster. Yet, my guess is that the bigger motivator for people to carpool is the rising price of gas.

Just this week there was an article about how my city, San Francisco, has the highest gas prices in the country -- $3.52 per gallon, on average. Part of the reason it's so expensive here is due to extra taxes related to environmental and regulatory standards. Maybe that's why Priuses seem to be blooming like 1,000 flowers here.

Increasing energy bills are also the reason that Google and other companies are looking at techniques to conserve energy along with alternative power like wind farms and solar panels.

Hi sfwriter,

I totally agree with your point. Charity, they say begins at home and i believe it's hi time the internet community takes the lead in combating global warming. It remains to be seen how the much trumpeted "internet virtualization" to reduce their power consumption becomes a reality. When it comes to combating global warming, it's always easier said than done.

However, if i could understand Bill's post correctly, it's how we can utilize the  internet as a'rewards system' to motivate consumers to be more enviromentally friendly. I think he has a strong point on that judging by the fact that the internet is becoming increasingly indispenasble tool in our society today. So rather than  imposing mandatory measures as it's done currently, we can use the popularity of the internet not only to  send out information on isues of global warming but also to lure consumers to reduce on CO2 emission. Consumers would not easily give up their energy needs but if the right rewards are there, as Bill wrote many will change their behavior and respond more positively. Reward systems has always been successful than mandatory measures, be it in the home, school or business and with our insatiable desire for internet services, i believe this measure will give a positive contribution towards combating global warming.

You are absolutely right. I think the global community of research and education networks need to play an important leadership role. Universities are now some of the worst offenders in building campus cyber-infrastructure facilities that consume enormous amounts of power with the resultant large output of CO2

A considerable amount of university reserach is not mission critical and therefore can tolerate network and computation resources that are powered by renewable energy sources like windmills and solar farms.

 But also universities can make money by selling carbon credits if they relocate their servers to renewable energy sites.  For more deatils please see my blog on how university research networks can play a critical leadership role

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2007/11/new-revenue-opportunities-for-r.html

 Bill

Thanks for that pointer to hostreview.com.  That is exactly the solution that I have been proposing as well. To my mind server farms should only be located at renewable energy sites.  We have the technology to do load sharing and re-routing between various frams when the wind dies or when the sun goes down.  We can deploy "follow the sun" or "follow the wind" grids to transfer jobs and data around the world from one renewable energy farm to another

For other examples please see my blog on replacing electrical transmission lines with optical networks and renewable energy server frams

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2007/11/replacing-electrical-transmission-lines.html 

Bill 

As the internet has brought us the ability to be connected and share information instantly with people all over the World - thus avoiding (in some cases) the need to travel, or send a package, etc. This reduces the amount of CO2 we produce, but the story doesn't end there.

I was reading an article on hostreview.com where it mentioned how much power does the infrastructure that supports the internet consume. They showed a rough estimate of 868 billion kWh of electricity per year (routing infrastrucutre, PCs, Data Centers, all related networks)

So there should also be an effort to bring the power consumption on the internet down. They proposed a company's solution, Solar Energy Host. They power their websites with solar energy (primarily).

And I think most of the World is not ready to go "green", and the Internet could help them understand why is it important (getting them the information of global warming, etc). I say this because I see my house at night and I see the router on, the cable box on, the printer on, the PC on... things that - in most cases - don't need to be on and are creating some unnecesary CO2. The basic idea is that people need to care about their environment. Impossing rules and measures helps but ultimitely, we should know better.

One of the best ways for the Internet community to fight global warming is to look in its own backyard first. One way to start would be to figure out how to run data centers more efficiently. Power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By 2005, data centers consumed about 1.2% of all the electricity in the U.S.

While that may not seem to be a very large percent, it's still one of the fastest-growing power consumers in the U.S. That electricity is generated by burning either coal or oil. You mentioned server virtualization in your last post, but that's only one answer to the problem. About half of the power consumption of data centers comes from cooling equipment, so that needs to be tackled as well if we're really serious about fighting global warming.

The Internet community also contributes significantly to pollution by the increasing amount of computing equipment that winds up in landfills leaking toxic chemicals into the ground water.