The electricity you use in your lifetime is probably only enough for these people to post a few photos...

We are already inseparable from the Internet. In many cases, we only realize the existence of the Internet when it is disconnected. But outside our sight, the power consumed by the entire huge network may be far beyond your imagination.

In 2015, Arthur Holland Michel recorded a 15-second video while riding a train. There was nothing interesting in the video, just the light and shadow outside the window constantly receding. The file size was less than 1MB, and he uploaded the video to the Internet.

It was not until nine years later that he suddenly discovered that this meaningless video had been quietly saved on the Internet. He no longer remembered why he did so, but in a server in a data center, this video was continuously consuming electricity.

Data energy consumption is growing rapidly

In 2023, a paper gave an algorithm for calculating the energy consumption of stored data. One of the core parameters was that every GB file would consume 0.18 kWh of electricity for every 24 hours of storage in the server. Holland Michel used this to calculate the carbon emissions of the 2015 video. He found that in the nine years from 2015 to 2024, this short video generated 100 grams of carbon emissions.

At first glance, this may not seem like much, but in fact, he uploaded 960 videos to the Internet last year, and because of the improvement in mobile phone image quality, the size of each video is larger than that of the video in 2015, which will consume more energy. What's more troublesome is that these videos may be saved on multiple platforms.

He will never be able to determine how many times this data has been backed up on the entire Internet. Every time a video is uploaded, it is like turning on a light bulb in a corner that no one is paying attention to. Unless the data is deleted, it will continue to consume electricity, emit greenhouse gases, and make the earth's climate worse.

Image source: Pixabay

The transmission of data also consumes a lot of energy. The personal account with the most followers on the social platform Instagram belongs to football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, who had approximately 190 million followers in 2020.

In order to transmit the photos posted by Ronaldo to his fans, Instagram needs to make the global network facilities work. According to the calculation of Dr. Rabih Bashroush of the University of East London, each photo posted by Ronaldo consumes 24,000kWh of electricity. In 2024, the per capita electricity consumption in China is close to 1,000kWh. 24,000kWh of electricity is enough for one person to use for 24 years, and for a family of three for 8 years. If we save some, 10 years is not a problem.

Artificial intelligence is consuming a huge amount of energy. At the rate of growth in the past, human energy supply will soon be unable to meet the needs of artificial intelligence. But in addition to artificial intelligence, the energy consumed by humans on the Internet should not be underestimated.

Every day on Earth, we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, 4 million GB of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages, and 720,000 hours of new YouTube videos. The total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide in 2018 was 33 zettabytes (ZB), or 33 trillion GB. In 2020, that number grew to 59 ZB, and is expected to reach an incredible 175 ZB by 2025.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the electricity consumed by data centers and network facilities has reached 1% to 1.5% of global energy consumption. Just like fruits do not grow on the shelf, the network does not come out of thin air. It consumes electricity all the time, and the total amount may exceed your imagination.

We have just entered the Internet age, and many of the "ancient gods" who created the Internet are still alive today. Time will bring more problems, one of which is that when we, today's Internet users, die, the data we leave behind will continue to consume future energy.

For example, a 2019 paper in Big Data & Society pointed out that by the 1960s, there may be more dead users on Facebook than living users. Dead users will no longer generate new data, but the data they left behind during their lifetime will continue to consume energy in the future.

Carbon emissions are everywhere

Consuming electricity means emitting carbon dioxide. The paper that calculated the energy consumption of data storage also pointed out that in the data industry, every 1kWh of electricity consumed corresponds to 0.23kg of carbon dioxide emissions. Once you understand this, you will understand how terrible the carbon emissions of data are.

Everyone has a responsibility to protect the environment. Of course, we all know that the moral pressure of environmental protection will fall more on the shoulders of enterprises, governments and wealthy people, but there are still many kind readers who are trying to develop the habit of saving. For example, use less disposable chopsticks and save printing paper. A pair of disposable chopsticks emits about 20 grams of carbon dioxide. But if you post a 500MB video on WeChat Moments/TikTok , the server only stores this video, and the electricity consumed every day corresponds to about 20 grams of carbon dioxide emissions. And it causes so much emissions every day.

Image source: Pixabay

Like artificial intelligence, data storage and transmission, and even the concept of "cloud" that is everywhere in life, are all heavy industries in terms of energy consumption. So in order to protect the earth's environment and slow down global warming, do we need to change our data habits now and delete unnecessary data on the Internet?

There is no need to do so. In fact, the amount of carbon emissions generated by data is not very relevant to most users. Without systematic changes in the data industry, relying on individual usage habits to reduce data carbon emissions is as inefficient as using shovels and buckets to stop a flood. This problem needs to be solved by the industry itself.

An important factor affecting data storage carbon emissions is the location of the data center. For example, Google has data centers in Ohio and Oregon in the United States, but the former's carbon emissions are five times that of the latter. This is mainly because the proportion of new energy installed capacity in power grids in different regions is different, and unit carbon emissions will be different. For example, in Montreal, Canada, each kWh of electricity corresponds to only 2 grams of carbon dioxide, but in Warsaw, Poland, each kWh of electricity corresponds to 723 grams of carbon dioxide. According to data from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the National Bureau of Statistics, in our country, each kWh of electricity corresponds to an average of 556.8 grams of carbon dioxide.

The domestic new energy industry has long been a bloodbath, but at the same time, they are also fundamentally reducing everyone's carbon emissions. According to the National Energy Administration, by the end of June 2024, my country's total installed capacity of wind power and photovoltaic power generation (1.18 billion kilowatts) has exceeded coal-fired power generation (1.17 billion kilowatts). Therefore, in the foreseeable future, although it is certain that we will upload more data to the Internet and energy consumption will increase, carbon emissions will decrease.

Of course, the industry itself can solve this problem to a large extent, but changing our habits may also help.

Today, more and more electronic products are touting themselves as "smart", but the data generated by many smart devices may be completely useless. For example, smart water cups, smart refrigerators, and smart dog leashes, most of the data they generate is useless.

IBM said that 90% of the data generated by these "smart" devices is dark data and will not be used by users at all. But they will continue to consume electricity. These useless "intelligence" are often deliberately created by manufacturers. As long as you recognize your needs, you can waste less money on these unnecessary functions and reduce carbon emissions for the whole society.

We may not need to turn everything into data. Next time you take a train, you don’t have to use your phone to record it like Holland Michel did nine years ago. The beauty of daily life is often beautiful enough to be appreciated with the eyes.

Planning and production

Source: Global Science (ID: huanqiukexue)

Author: Wang Yu

Editor: Wang Mengru

Proofread by Xu Lailinlin