[governance] The Bicycle-Powered Internet?

[Ian Peter]

Hi Riaz,

The subject is serious, but the article is silly in several respects.

Firstly, most estimates put Internet power usage at about 2% of global
totals. I have seen some higher figures, but none suggesting more than 10%.
So there are some significant other targets out there.

But as regards Internet itself ­ no, we don¹t need to all hop on bikes to
have a more energy-neutral Internet. In fact a zero carbon emission Internet
is possible ­ see writings of Bill St Arnaud and others on this.

Solar is useful, whatever the article says. As is wind. Even if relocation
of data centres near renewable energy centres only reduces power consumption
by 50%, that¹s a significant saving both ecologically and economically. So
very do-able. And I don¹t think we need to be too clever in an Internet on
which the sun never sets to redirect some traffic to areas wherever the sun
Is shining at that point of time to reduce carbon emissions.

Then there is hydro and hydrothermal. There is no reason not to relocate all
data centres in the world to Iceland to take advantage of their resources.
(I think I suggested this at IGF Rio)

So there is lots we can (and should) do ­ we don¹t have to stop using the
Internet or download smaller files to make significant progress here.

Ian Peter



From: Riaz K Tayob <riaz.tayob at gmail.com>
Reply-To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>, Riaz K Tayob
<riaz.tayob at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 16:17:24 +0300
To: <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>
Subject: [governance] The Bicycle-Powered Internet?


  
 
 
   

http://www.greens.org/s-r/59/59-06.html
Eat, Sleep, Click: The Bicycle-Powered Internet

by Jane Anne Morris

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

What about worldwide Internet electricity use? Available 2010 estimates‹200
billion kWh [4] ‹ are probably conservative. Whatâat's that in bicycles?

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.

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?

Solar and wind-powered Internet

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.

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.

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.

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 3300 square miles. Most wind power
sites are less productive than the sites from which these numbers were
derived. 


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.

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.

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.

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.

Megawhat?
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.

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.

Energy-intensive, thy name is Internet

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?

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.

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.

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. [7]

Who is paying for this?

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.

For instance, in 2007 a Google Inc. data center got tax breaks on utility
bills, plus a property tax exemption. Iowa'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."

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.

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.

Finally, there are those bargain-basement electricity bills. Data center
electricity rates are as low as 3­4¢/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]

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.

If inefficiency is not the problem, efficiency is not the solution

When I raise the issue of the massive electricity use of all things
Internet, everyone tells me how efficient IT is becoming.

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" (Synthesis/Regeneration 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.

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. 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.

Food, internet, spam

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.

But 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. 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.

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. 

File Size Matters
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.

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 90% of all email
is still spam, 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 as many as a quarter of all searches are for porn.
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 at 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]

One person estimated that fantasy football 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.

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.

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.

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.

Or, we can begin to give it the attention we give a burger.

-------------------------
Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris (democracythemepark.org
<http://democracythemepark.org/> ), 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).


Notes

1. 400 watts/server, for 8760 hours, would be 3,504,000 watt hours, or 3500
kWh a year necessary for one server.

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).

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.

4. Rich Miller, Google's Energy Story: High Efficiency, Huge Scale,
September 8, 2011, Data Center Knowledge website datacenterknowledge.com
<http://datacenterknowledge.com/> , 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.

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.

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.

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.

8. One source for this is Ron Starner, Is Energy Still Oklahoma's Trump
Card? Site Selection Online, July 2007.

9. Alex Roslin, Dirty Data: The Internet's Giant Carbon Footprint, June 4,
2011, Montreal Gazette.

10. Alex Roslin (Postmedia News), Could the Net... Montreal Gazette June 3,
2011.

11. John Markoff, Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight, NYT , May 20, 2011.

12. James Glanz, Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity, NYT,
Sept. 9, 2011.

13. http://www.joulex.net/Green_IT_Blog/bid/58292/




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