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</p><p><a href="http://www.greens.org/s-r/59/59-06.html" target="_blank">http://www.greens.org/s-r/59/59-06.html</a><br><font face="georgia, serif"><b><i><font size="7"><font color="#006600">Eat,
Sleep, Click: The Bicycle-Powered Internet</font></font></i></b><font size="5"><br><br>by
Jane Anne Morris<br><br>Save a tree, bank online. Subscribe online,
reduce your carbon footprint. Listen to music online, watch movies
online, read books online. No mess, no fuss. Google Inc. has
photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on its headquarters. With all that
footprint-lightening, you may soon be down to no ecological footprint
at all, right?<br><br>Since everyone wants the Internet to have a
gentle footprint and not be "evil," we should power it with
green electricity. Start with a bicycle generator and a server. Here
are some back-of-the-envelope figures.<br><br>All the stuff on the
Internet, or in the "cloud," is kept aloft by computers
called servers (plus routers and so on). An average server draws 400
watts/hour, half of that for cooling (fairly typical), and 3500
kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, [1] because it never shuts down.<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>A
healthy biker can produce a constant 100 watts/hour on a bicycle
generator, a generous estimate. Four generator bikes at 100
watts/hour apiece would power a server. Alas, that single server
can't accomplish much by itself. Various techies have estimated that
a single online search activates between 1000 and 20,000 servers,
often located all over the world. <br><br>Numerous servers are housed
together in places called server farms or data centers. To power a
modest-sized data center (50,000 servers) by bicycle power would
require almost a million pedalers and an area equivalent to 347
football fields. [2] Data centers can be as small as closets at the
back of a business, or as large as several football fields and use as
much electricity as small cities. They run 24/7/365, and tend to have
multipl redundant backup systems, so no one has to wait 10 seconds to
learn from a web site if it's raining outside.</b></span><br><br>What
finally matters is not this or that server or data center, but the
overall Internet electricity use. How much bicycle power would it
take to run the Internet? Later we can figure out how to landscape
the facility, and decide where to put the snack bars and
port-a-potties. <br><br>The EPA's conservative and dated number for
2006 Internet electricity use within the US alone is 60 billion kWh.
Getting that much electricity from the setup described above would
require 600 million bike generators. Assuming 6-hour pedaling shifts,
that would take 2.4 billion pedalers. Think of the stimulus to the
global economy: pedaling jobs for the entire populations of the US
(305 million), Canada (33 million), Mexico (110 million), South
America (382 million), India (1.5 billion), and Japan (127
million).<br><br>Five years later, that number has doubled (at
least). It is widely claimed that in 2010 the Internet used 3% of US
electricity (3884 billion kWh), which is 117 billion kWh. So, we're
now talking about 1.2 billion bike generators and 4.8 billion
pedalers.<br><br>In 2007, an independent outsider who is not on the
dole of the IT industry calculated that US Internet energy use was
around 350 billion kWh annually, approximately six times the EPA's
2006 estimate, [3] and three times the conservative 2010 estimate
used above. I will use the lower numbers, but actual Internet
electricity use may be much higher.<br><br>What about worldwide
Internet electricity use? Available 2010 estimates—200 billion kWh
[4] — are probably conservative. Whatâat's that in
bicycles?<br><br>Using the same assumptions as before, that worldwide
Internet could be powered by a mere two billion bike generators, with
8 billion people pedaling. (Current world (over)population is 7
billion.) If you placed that many bicycles end-to-end, they would
reach far enough for three round trips to the moon, and then a trip
back up.<br><br>Who would want to design a bicycle-generator system
to power the Internet? Someone who wanted to imagine a human-scale
equivalent for how much energy the Internet already sucks up. What
about other "renewable" energy sources?<br><br>Solar and
wind-powered Internet<br><br>At the biggest, most successful
photovoltaic projects in the world, the rule of thumb is that 10
acres of panels produces a megawatt of capacity (as would 10,000
bicycle generators). A square mile (640 acres) could provide 64 MW.
Each megawatt might yield 1.5 million kWh/year, so the annual kWh
from a square mile of good solar would be 96 million.<br><br>Generating
an annual 117 billion kWh (2010 US Internet use) with solar would
require at least 1220 square miles of PV panels, and 78,000 MW. [5]
For the 200 billion kWh number for world Internet use, it would take
2081 square miles (that's Delaware) and 133,200 MW.<br><br>What about
a wind-powered Internet? Experience in the wind turbine industry (and
again in the choicest spots), has shown that it's good to get 20 MW
of capacity per square mile. Three million kWh a year from each
megawatt of capacity is also optimistic.<br><br>Using wind turbines
to get that 117 billion kWh for 2010 US Internet electricity use
would require 1950 square miles. [6] The 200 billion kWh for 2010
world Internet use would require<span style="background:#33ff33">
<b>3300 square miles</b></span>. Most wind power sites are less
productive than the sites from which these numbers were derived. </font></font>
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<p><span style="background:#ffffff"><font size="5"><font face="georgia, serif"><font color="#000000"><b><i><br></i></b>It's
not appropriate to compare solar and wind directly to conventional
power plants. Except for maintenance and accidents, coal and nuke
plants operate 24/7, though demand drops at night. In contrast,
solar is always down at night, and wind is variable, exactly what
data centers can't be.<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>With
solar, more than half the electricity would have to be stored for
use when little or no power is generated. The huge batteries
necessary for storing this much power look like a cross between
upturned railroad freight cars and electric substations. They
require space, maintenance, and cooling. Every time energy is
converted from one form to another (like rotating energy to
electrical energy to heat energy, or electricity into batteries and
then out again) energy is lost. That slippage increases the initial
kWh necessary, but I have not factored that in.</b></span><br><br>Also
omitted in calculations here are the power lines, substations,
maintenance roads, other support facilities, and ladders and buckets
of ammonia water to clean PV panels. Not to mention the fact that
most areas don't get nearly as much sun as the prize spots already
selected for large solar arrays. I'm also not considering the
resources needed to manufacture, transport, and maintain the PV
panels. Similar considerations apply to wind power.<br><br>Solar and
wind have different advantages. Fewer acres of solar than wind are
required for each MW of capacity (10 versus 32), but for each MW
capacity of wind, you get more kWh/year (3 million as compared to
1.5 million). That is because you are never, ever, going to average
more than 12 hours daily of solar. However, you might average more
than that for wind, depending on location and circumstances.
<br><br><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#660000">Megawhat?<br>A
solar panel rated at one kilowatt of capacity will produce one
kilowatt-hour of energy if the sun shines on it steadily for an
hour. Terms like megawatt, kilowatt, and watt express power or
capacity, while megawatt-hour, kilowatt-hour, and watt-hour measure
energy. A kilowatt is a thousand watts; a megawatt is a million
watts or a thousand kilowatts.</font></font><br><br>At the scale
necessary to power data centers, solar, wind, and even bicycle power
involve considerable habitat loss. Bicycle space to power the 2010
US Internet would be about 4304 square miles (about the size of the
Everglades). For the 2010 world Internet, about the combined area of
Delaware and Connecticut. When chunks of ecosystem are shoveled into
industrialism's mill, Gaia is diminished. Acres sacrificed to solar
arrays, wind farms, power line rights of way, or thousands of
bicycle generator pads destroy habitat no less than those given over
to GMO crops, cooling ponds, interstate highways, and parking
lots.<br><br>Energy-intensive, thy name is Internet<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>How
can the Internet use so much electricity? Suppose you have an
awesome video of your cat at a laptop using her little cat feet to
scroll through online celebrity cats in fetching poses. (Click for
full screen.) It's stored in your email account, and you have a copy
on your laptop and/or handheld. Your email is backed up by the
company that offers it, and you have backup service for your laptop,
so that's more Internet storage space on servers somewhere; then the
back-up companies back up their back-ups. You send the cat video to
50 people. Some store it in their emails; some download it and have
it backed up on their own online backup systems; some send it out to
a few other people; and some do all three. How many places can we
find the cat? It's a hall of mirrors, a grain of wheat doubling on
each square of a chessboard. All of it eats kilowatt-hours. How much
fracking is that cat porn worth to you?</b></span><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b><br>All
online content is not born equal. It takes very little electricity
to support text, even italics. Graphics such as photos and drawings
are much more energy-intensive. Music exceeds even graphics, and
video (bouncing bunnies, or time-lapse wrinkle cream results) is the
greediest of all. <br></b></span><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>Online
action is hosted and processed in massive data centers that use up
to 100 or even 200 MW of demand; data center operators are not often
eager to release this information. Chicago's Lakeside Technology
Center (a data center) reportedly draws 100 MW, a higher electric
demand than any other Commonwealth Edison customer except O'Hare
airport. A quick check reveals what a "renewable"
electricity supply would look like for a facility like this. With
bike generators: over a million generators, over four million
pedalers, and almost half a million acres, which is 757 square miles
(almost three times the size of Chicago). Probably not available
anywhere near the Loop. Using solar panels: 2917 acres (2210
football fields), not counting battery space, which is also probably
not in the Chicago zoning plan. Using wind in the "windy city":
9347 acres (or 7081 football fields), again not counting battery
space.</b></span><br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>As
Alex Roslin of the Montreal Gazette put it, if the Internet were a
country, it would be the fifth biggest power consumer, ahead of
India & Germany.</b></span> [7]<br><br>Who is paying for
this?<br><br>Tax breaks and other subsidies are common for data
centers. Even modest-sized ones often reap government subsidies for
drawing huge amounts of electricity and providing fewer jobs per
buck, or per kWh, than almost any other kind of facility.<br><br>For
instance, in 2007 a Google Inc. data center got tax breaks on
utility bills, plus a property tax exemption. <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>Iowa'</b></span>s
own web site describes the tax exemption as including "cooling
systems, cooling towers, and other temperature control
infrastructure.... also exempt from property tax are all power
infrastructure for transformation, distribution, or management of
electricity used for the maintenance and operation of the web search
portal, including but not limited to exterior dedicated business
owned substations, back-up power generation systems, battery
systems, and related infrastructure; and racking systems, cabling,
and trays, which are necessary for the maintenance and operation of
the web search portal." <br><br>Iowa even calculated its
expected tax losses: $3.6 million in 2009, $12.7 million in 2010,
$22 million in 2011, and $32.7 million in 2012. The corporation got
a similar deal in North Carolina, where estimates of tax losses to
the state were approximately $97 million over 30 years.<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>Lack
of enforcement of environmental and occupational safety laws across
the board is an often-overlooked form of subsidy available to large
corporations, including data centers. This includes the
cradle-to-grave production, processing, transport, and use of
nuclear and fossil fuels, as well as the toxic waste and byproducts
of same. Companies burn through energy and resources far more
cheaply than would be possible if laws "on the books" were
enforced.</b></span><br><br>Finally, there are those
bargain-basement electricity bills. Data center <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>electricity
rates</b></span> are as low as 3–4¢/kWh, while residential
customers pay much higher rates: easily 15, 20, 25¢/kWh, and
even steeper when charges for distribution and other fees are
included. [8]<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>The public
is massively subsidizing data centers, the Internet, and the profits
of IT corporations. Yet, many corporations with huge data centers
are not eager to advertise their locations, and use third parties to
negotiate their deals. Some go to great lengths to hide their
electricity use. In 2007, for example, at Google Inc.'s urging,
Oklahoma rewrote its open records law to allow data center owners to
conceal from the public the amount of electricity used.</b></span><br><br>If
inefficiency is not the problem, efficiency is not the
solution<br><br>When I raise the issue of the massive electricity
use of all things Internet, everyone tells me how efficient IT is
becoming. <br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>The idea that
efficiency reduces consumption is at best debatable, and at worst a
public relations scam. As Don Fitz wrote in "Why Energy
Efficiency Isn't Reducing Consumption" (<i>Synthesis/Regeneration</i>
50:30, 2009), over a century and a half of research on the
relationship between efficiency and consumption of a resource has
marshaled considerable evidence that the opposite is true. Since
Stanley Jevons documented that coal consumption increased 10-fold
after smelters tripled their efficiency (The Coal Question, 1865),
the phenomenon has been called the Jevons Paradox. Historically, in
capitalist systems, increased efficiency has led to more
consumption, not less.</b></span><br><br>Being efficient is good,
but it does not mean sustainable, it does not mean green, and it
does not portend reduced consumption. Data center efficiency is
improving, and Google Inc.'s are reputed to be among the best.<span style="background:#33ff33">
<b>But when Gaia is diminished by the ripping out of coal and the
dumping of sludge, her suffering is in no way reduced if the
resulting electricity is used "efficiently." Earth's
problem is not the inefficiency of resource use, but the quantity.
Ask Gaia</b></span>.<br><br>Food, internet, spam<br><br>Why do we
figure out the ecological implications of eating a hamburger but not
clicking a search? When it comes to food, the green or even greenish
band of the political spectrum is all over it. Local food. Organic
food. Slow food. Urban agriculture. Permaculture. Rooftop gardens.
Alice Waters, Will Allen, Michael Pollan. "Eat food. Not too
much. Mostly plants." Fast food nation. Eat low on the food
chain.<br><br>But <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>when it comes
to the Internet, people spout shallow unexamined cliches as they tap
at sleek, shiny gadgets. The PV panels at Google Inc.'s headquarters
and other cheap stunts deflect attention from the enormity of
Internet energy use</b></span>. Engineering Professor Mohamed
Cheriet, at Montreal's Ecole de Technologie Superieure, who works on
"green" IT innovation, gushes, "We've found the key
to the problem: Follow the wind, follow the sun." [9] The
Internet is the fast food triple bacon cheeseburger of
communications, yet people are convinced it's green.<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>Are
the brains who figured out it takes 150 or 630 or 1300 gallons of
water to produce a hamburger just out to lunch when it comes to the
Internet? Why is the Internet—a global system if there ever was
one—immune from the same analysis? Spending two hours on the porch
showing your neighbor your family photo album is not especially
energy-intensive. Doing so online, and sending it around to everyone
on your email list, carries vastly higher ecological costs. </b></span><br><br><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#660000">File
Size Matters<br>A text-only file of the Bible is approximately 1.5
MB. With pictures, depending on how elaborate, it is closer to 100
MB. A 2-hour video about the greatest story ever told would use up
more like 1-1.5 GB. Comparing music and video, a 4-minute video
would use about 24 MB, while 4 minutes of music would use only about
4 MB.</font></font><br><br>What's the actual content that billions
of publicly subsidized kWh go to support? Nicholas Carr (The Big
Switch, 2008) estimated in 1996 that 94% of all emails are spam, and
that there may be 85 billion spams a day. This year, John Markoff in
the New York Times claimed that about <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>90%
of all email is still spam</b></span>, and that one single spam
campaign generated three emails for each person on the planet, some
21 billion messages. Ken Auletta (Googled, 2009) suggested that <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>as
many as a quarter of all searches are for porn</b></span>. According
to Alex Roslin at the Montreal Gazette, 250 billion emails are sent
daily. [10] The study Markoff referenced suggested that over 12
million messages were needed to sell $100 of Viagra. [11] Dennis
Walsh from green@work, among others, states that over 200 million
Internet searches happen daily in the US alone; 100 million photos
are uploaded daily. Google Inc. has reported that it carries out
about a billion searches per day, according to James Glanz in the
New York Times. [12] <br><br>One person estimated that <span style="background:#33ff33"><b>fantasy
football</b></span> aficionados spent 2.4 billion hours online per
season. [13] Online games, role-playing, social networking,
gambling, and an almost unbelievable amount of advertising are up
there in the "cloud" at tremendous energy cost. Much of it
is not the relatively energy-cheap text, but the photos, music,
video, bouncing cartoons, and interactive click-fests that are
hundreds or thousands of times more energy-intensive. Subsidizing
the entire current Internet system because an activist can upload
photos of strip mining and clearcutting is like subsidizing an
industrial-sized Wal-Mart because six feet of shelf space holds
organic spinach.<br><br>The Internet is not, and will not be,
powered by so-called renewable energy, magical energy that is
somehow without consequences. Sleek, glowing screens may hide the
truth from people who don't want to hear about it, but the
consequences remain. The real costs of Internet electricity use are
being cast over state boundaries and national borders, across class,
ethnic, and species lines, and onto future generations.<br><br>In
hindsight, most wish that we had used a little more foresight about
the automobile. Today is a good time to look up from our screens and
take advantage of the fact that we are still in the Model T era of
the Internet.<br><br><span style="background:#33ff33"><b>If we keep
pretending that the Internet is innocuous, neutral, democratic,
clean, and green, we can look forward to more iPipelines, iFracking,
iMountaintop Removal, iCoal Plants, iNukes, iStripmining, iSpecies
Extinction, iHabitat Loss, iClimate Change, iTar Sands, iSludge,
iOil spills, iFloods, and continued iResource Wars.</b></span><br><br>Or,
we can begin to give it the attention we give a
burger.<br><br>-------------------------<br><i>Corporate
anthropologist Jane Anne Morris (<a href="http://democracythemepark.org/" target="_blank">democracythemepark.org</a>),
whose most recent book is Gaveling Down the Rabble: How "Free
Trade" is Stealing Our Democracy (Apex/Rowman &
Littlefield, 2008), first wrote about Internet energy use in "The
Energy Nightmare of Web Server Farms: Feet in the Cloud, Head in the
Sand," Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social
Thought, Winter 2008 (here).</i><br><br><br><b>Notes</b><br><br>1.
400 watts/server, for 8760 hours, would be 3,504,000 watt hours, or
3500 kWh a year necessary for one server.<br><br>2. Assume 4
pedalers (6-hour shifts) for each bike generator. 57,600 sq. ft in a
football field, or 1.32 acres, including end zones. 43,560 feet per
acre. 20,000,000 divided by 57,600 is 200,000 divided by 576 which
is 347.22 or 347 football fields. In acres it is 459.136. (200,000
generators, 800,000 pedalers, twenty million square feet).<br><br>3.
David Sarokin, untitled blog answer, Sat. Aug. 18, 2007, estimating
"electricity consumption for the Internet," with
assumptions and discussion. This same DS estimated world usage at
that time as 868 billion kWh/year. Sarokin data includes pc's,
modems, etc.<br><br>4. Rich Miller, Google's Energy Story: High
Efficiency, Huge Scale, September 8, 2011, Data Center Knowledge
website <a href="http://datacenterknowledge.com/" target="_blank">datacenterknowledge.com</a>,
quoting a report by Jon Koomey, whose estimate for 2010 was 198.8
billion kWh, worldwide, for Internet use. I rounded that to 200
billion kWh.<br><br>5. I looked up the major solar PV projects in
the world and took a rough average. 117 billion kWh divided by 96
million per square mile yields the number of square miles =1218.75 =
1219 square miles; 117 billion divided by 1.5 million kWh/yr yields
number of megawatts = 78,000 MW.<br><br>6. I looked up the major
wind projects in the world and took a rough average. 20 MW per sq.
mile, 3 million kWh per MW, so 60 million kWh per sq mile, so would
need 117 divided by 60 = 1950 square miles.<br><br>7. Alex Roslin
(Postmedia News), Could the Net be killing the planet one web search
at a time? in the Montreal Gazette, June 3, 2011.<br><br>8. One
source for this is Ron Starner, Is Energy Still Oklahoma's Trump
Card? Site Selection Online, July 2007.<br><br>9. Alex Roslin, Dirty
Data: The Internet's Giant Carbon Footprint, June 4, 2011, Montreal
Gazette.<br><br>10. Alex Roslin (Postmedia News), Could the Net...
Montreal Gazette June 3, 2011.<br><br>11. John Markoff, Study Sees
Way to Win Spam Fight, NYT , May 20, 2011.<br><br>12. James Glanz,
Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity, NYT, Sept. 9,
2011.<br><br>13. <a href="http://www.joulex.net/Green_IT_Blog/bid/58292/" target="_blank">http://www.joulex.net/Green_IT_Blog/bid/58292/</a></font></font></font></span></p>
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