3% of the electricity produced by the US goes into its computers. We tend to think of computers as a low energy consumption devices, and they are. But without much notice they have crept into every aspect of our life. And now the computers in the US use 3% of its electricity. I wonder how much kettles use.
And some of those computers are housed in massive data centres such as those that are running Facebook. As Facebook adds 600,000 new users every day and as their monthly electricity bill passes $1,000,000 (see here), a lot of carbon is being emitted. We don’t really see it but every time we click on a Facebook link, some computer starts processing and some hard disk starts turning (if it wasn’t already) and some network card starts sending, all contributing to the electricity usage and thus the carbon emissions. But how much is all of this really.
My suggestion to Facebook, which any reasonable person in Facebook would strongly reject, is to put a small counter somewhere on the screen that measures your contribution to Facebook’s carbon emissions. Let’s find out how much carbon we emitted just by browsing through our friend’s photos because we are bored at work.
A quick calculation to show how much electricity each user is responsible for consuming (1m dollars / 140m users) will give you about 8.5 cents worth of electricity per year. Of course you have to add your own computer’s electrcitiy usage too. It doesn’t sound like much but every litte bit adds up.
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