Internet eats up less energy than you think

Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed. Those are the conclusions of a new analysis by Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet, two leading scientists in the field of technology, energy use and the environment. Both are former researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Koomey is now an independent analyst, and Masanet is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

(Masanet receives research funding from Amazon.) They said their analysis, published on Thursday as a commentary article in Joule, a scientific journal, was not necessarily intended to be reassuring. Instead, they said, it is meant to inject a dose of reality into the public discussion of technology’s impact on the environment. The surge in digital activity spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientists said, has fuelled the debate and prompted dire warnings of environmental damage. They are concerned that wayward claims, often amplified by social media, could shape behavior and policy.

“We’re trying to provide some guidelines for thinking about our increasingly digital lifestyles and the impact on energy consumption and the environment,” Masanet said. The headline on their analysis is “Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls in assessing the internet’s energy and carbon impacts.” Exaggerated claims, the pair said, are often well-intentioned efforts by researchers who make what may seem like reasonable assumptions. But they are not familiar with fast-changing computer technology — processing, memory, storage and networks.

In making predictions, they tend to underestimate the pace of energy-saving innovation and how the systems work. The impact of video streaming on network energy consumption is an example. Once a network is up and running, the amount of power it uses is much the same whether large amounts of data are flowing or very little. And steady improvements in technology decrease electricity consumption. In their analysis, the two authors cite information from two large international network operators, Telefónica and Cogent, which have reported data traffic and energy use for the Covid year of 2020. Telefónica handled a 45 pc jump in data through its network with no increase in energy use. Cogent’s electricity use fell 21 percent even as data traffic increased 38 percent.

“Yes, we’re using a lot more data services and putting a lot more data through networks,” Koomey said. “But we’re also getting a lot more efficient very quickly.” Another pitfall, the authors say, is to look at one high-growth sector of the tech industry and assume both that electricity use is increasing proportionally and that it is representative of the industry as a whole. Computer data centers are a case study. The biggest data centers, from which consumers and workers tap services and software over the internet, do consume huge amounts of electricity. These so-called cloud data centers are operated by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. From 2010 to 2018, the data workloads hosted by the cloud data centers increased 2,600 percent and energy consumption increased 500 percent. But energy consumption for all data centers rose less than 10 percent.

What happened, the authors explain, was mainly a huge shift of workloads to the bigger, more efficient cloud data centers — and away from traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies. In 2010, an estimated 79 percent of data center computing was done in traditional computer centers. By 2018, 89 percent of data center computing took place in cloud data centers. “The big cloud providers displaced vastly less efficient corporate data centers,” Koomey said.