
Berkeley Lab: It Takes 70B Kilowatt Hours a Year to Run the Internet (2016) - ryanmercer
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet/#262fab161fff
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ryanmercer
Wow, and that's 3 years ago, I imagine streaming and cloud services have seen
considerable growth in that time.

>To generate 70 billion kwh you’d need power plants with a baseload capacity
of 8,000 megawatts — equivalent to about 8 big nuclear reactors, or twice the
output of all the nation’s solar panels.

>Sliced up per capita, the average American uses about 200 kwh a year for his
or her internet use, costing about $20. For those of you obsessed with carbon
footprints, your internet use is responsible for the emission of about 300
pounds of carbon dioxide per year.

Obviously that solar panel figure is probably inaccurate now, 3 years is a
long time with the way PV has been deploying but compared to the growth in
data usage/servers in that period it may still be relatively accurate.

