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IP: Science on Energy

From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 19:04:38 -0400

From: Bruce R Koball <bkoball () well com>

Dave,

Regarding your query:

 I am trying to make sense out of what appear to be outrageous estimates
 that computers and networks and their power consumption is one of the
 causes of the national power shortage.

 In 1999, Mark P. Mills published a report for the Greening Earth
 Society (summarized in an article in Forbes Magazine) that attempted to
 calculate the "Internet related" portion of electricity use. This
 report claimed that electricity use associated with the Internet
 totaled about 8 percent of all U.S. electricity use in 1998 and that it
 would grow to half of all electricity use in the next decade.

 Can an IPer help either confirm or deny such claims. To me it does not
 compute.


See the following from Science magazine:

 Good news for Californians: You may be able to keep pecking away at the
 keyboard without feeling guilty about the energy crisis. A new study
 from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California estimates that
 computer and Internet use is sucking up much less power than some have
 claimed.

 In 1999, Mark Mills stoked up the debate with a study done for a group,
 the Greening Earth Society, that believes carbon dioxide emissions are
 good for human welfare. Mills asserted, among other things, that every
 time someone orders a book from Amazon.com, the transaction burns up
 the equivalent of about 225 grams of coal. He said the Internet
 accounts for about 8% of U.S. power use, and that "1 billion PCs on the
 World Wide Web"--as predicted by Intel for 2004--would create a global
 electricity demand equal to total current U.S.  consumption.*

 The Environmental Protection Agency asked the Berkeley lab to evaluate
 Mills's claims. So a group headed by Jonathan Koomey of the Energy
 End-Use Forecasting Group has produced an estimate of energy use by all
 U.S. computerized office equipment.** The total, they aver--and that
 includes non-Internet activity--would be no more than 74 terawatt-hours
 per year, or 2% of total U.S. electricity use. They also say, in an
 unpublished paper, that Mills's estimate of a typical PC's power
 consumption of 1000 watts is way overboard: The reality is closer to
 150 watts.

 * http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG20010103S0005/1
 ** http://enduse.lbl.gov/Projects/InfoTech.html

  --"Science" 2001 February 23; 291: 1453 (in NetWatch)


-brk-

Bruce R. Koball         B. R. Koball, Inc.   (direct)   510 845-1350
bkoball () well com        2210 Sixth St        (office)   510 548-2450
"No Compromised Keys!"  Berkeley, CA 94710   (fax)      510 845-3946




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