Your CO2 footprint when using the internet

Freitag Mai 04, 2007

How much CO2 does a Google Search produce? Servers need electrical power. According to recent studies, all servers in the US accounted for more than 1.2% of the nationwide annual electrical power consumption, more than all TV sets combined. And, according to Netcraft, the number of internet hosts has doubled since then.

The majority of electrical power is created by burning fossil fuels like coal, gas or oil, producing carbon dioxide CO2 ad global warming. So how much CO2 does one Google search produce? One EBAY auction or a SecondLife avatar? Or one blog on blogs.sun.com?

For a keynote at the german EBAY developer's conference I calculated the following numbers and compared them to the CO2 emission of a Toyota Prius hybrid car and a human being:

My calculations and the sources for the number of servers etc. can be found in my presentation (in german language, but the numbers should speak for themselves). Download ODF here or PDF here. Or view online the Flash presentation (created with StarOffice Flas Export) below:

As an example, this is how I calculated the surpisingly high blog post on blogs.sun.com number:

We are hosting 66183 blogs in 3 years, running on two T2000 (the best servers you can get when it comes to power efficiency).

A pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers draws 2*320Watts. Double that number for cooling and infrastructure, so you need 33628KWh in three years. That's 0.5KWh for every blog! One KWh electral power created in a coal power plant creates 1700 grams of CO2 - so the global warming effect of this blog is comparable to a runner running 21 kilometers (or sitting in front of his computer for one whole day).

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Posted at 08:29PM Mai 04, 2007 by rolfk in Eco
Tags: eco web20