Power Used by the Internet

According to a recent CNN Money report, it’s a lot. The Internet uses more electricity in the U.S. than the auto industry uses to make cars and trucks. In the comparison, U.S. data centers alone consumed more electricity than auto manufacturing and nearly half that of the chemical industry, which are the nation's largest industrial users of electricity. The electricity needed to power and cool the millions of servers that make the Internet hum has grown by more than 10% a year for the last decade. Today, with more than 1.5 billion people using the internet all around the world, the energy demands of the web is currently growing at 12%. It now accounts for about 2% of all the electricity consumed in the United States.

Here are some interesting stats regarding power usage of major Internet companies, from Peer 1, of the total Internet power usage. Facebook is leading the pack, followed by other familiar names:

So, what are we doing about it? From what’ I’m able to gather, we’re trying to go green. But the lobby group Greenpeace recently released a report faulting several Internet companies for not powering more of these data centers with cleaner energy. "This (the Internet) is the largest demand growth in the United States," said Greenpeace tech analyst Casey Harrell. "Is it going to be connected to old, dirty power, or will it be in renewable energy?" The tech firms counter by saying they are working on ways to make their operations more efficient. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company has just opened up a data center that uses a design nearly 40% more efficient than previous versions. And Google is relying on renewable sources like wind for a big chunk of its energy needs -- something that Greenpeace gives the company credit for. Google also cools its data centers with more efficient cooling towers instead of compressor units. In fact, Google is in the energy business with the creation of a subsidiary called Google Energy. From what I’ve researched, industry experts aren’t predicting the Internet to crash our power grids and the big players are realizing the need for using clean power. Internet usage itself won’t kill the planet… at least for the foreseeable future.