Subject: Viridian Note 00070: The Coal-Burning Net Key concepts: Internet energy consumption Attention Conservation Notice: It's thought-provoking, but it's also from Forbes magazine, a sump of loony fellow-travellers for a wealthy political crank. It's long and very detailed. It is a moral outrage. Links: Forbes magazine, May 31, 01999 http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0531/6311070chart1.htm (((this horrific chart would make a great Viridian T- shirt)))) http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0531/6311070a.htm (((the full text of the article quoted here))) http://www.phuber.com/ (((the co-author's home-page == he's an anti-litigation crank and a self-appointed scourge of "junk science," especially when that science really worries corporate lawyers.))) http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0405/6307126a.htm (((a ghastly article in which Forbes shows their true colors by blithely asserting that dumping fertilizer in the ocean to provoke huge algae growth should neatly mop up carbon-dioxide. And, by the way, China and the Third World should pay the USA a carbon-tax subsidy, because of North America's big green forests. "Kyoto, go pound sand" == I reckon this must be the Steve Forbes climate-relief scheme in a nutshell.))) Entries in the Viridian Power Banner Contest: http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rmharman/img/viridian/warn.fo ssil.gif http://www.subterrane.com http://www.netaxs.com/~morgana (note dino animation at bottom of page) http://www.phuq.com/viridian http://www.freeyellow.com/members6/vandewater/banner.gif http://humlog.homestead.com/viridianart/index.html http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/banner.html http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/sunservr.html http://www.dux.ru/digbody/viridian/vir.htm http://members.aol.com/stjude/viridian http://www.id.iit.edu/~chad/viridian/viridian_banner.htm http://www.dnai.com/~catnhat/viridianbanners.htm http://www.erols.com/ljaurbach/Banners.htm and, in the traditional last-minute rush: http://members.aol.com/saintware/inhalt.htm http://www.thespace.org/ads/viridian.gif http://www.nonsensical.com/viridian/ http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/01.html http://www.msys.net/reid/main.html This contest is now closed. A winner will be announced shortly. "Dig more coal == the PCs are coming" By Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills "SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EDISON, meet Amazon.com. Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on-line. (((Aaaargh!))) "The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy- intensive. (...) (((This statistic may be dodgy, but it instantly suggests a new Viridian desk accessory. Every time you move ten megabytes in or out of your computer, you are "rewarded" with the ghastly desktop image of a FIVE-POUND BUCKET OF COAL.))) "Under the PC's hood, demand for horsepower doubles every couple of years. Yes, today's microprocessors are much more efficient than their forerunners at turning electricity into computations. But total demand for digital power is rising far faster than bit efficiencies are. We are using more chips == and bigger ones == and crunching more numbers. The bottom line: taken all together, chips are running hotter,fans are whirring faster, and the power consumption of our disk drives and screens is rising. (((The Net is directly confronting the specter of its own evil here. The fire-breathing energy net is the dark side of the Force.))) "For the old thermoelectrical power complex, widely thought to be in senescent decline, the implications are staggering. (((Since this is Forbes magazine, you'll be unsurprised to hear these "staggering implications" are a *healthy boost in profits for old filthy coal industries.* The obvious Viridian "staggering implication" that it is past high time these "senescent industries" stopped staggering and got their life-support plugs pulled. They must be entirely replaced by a new power infrastructure, far better, far cleaner, and far more advanced, across the board. Or else, despite our wealth, expertise and education, you and I are evil people, collaborating in acts we know to be wicked == and we deserve whatever we get.))) "About half of the trillion-dollar infrastructure of today's electric power grid exists to serve just two century-old technologies == the lightbulb and the electric motor. (((To think that we're stupidly gambling our planet's future for a mere trillion dollars.))) "Not long ago, that meant little prospect for growth in the power industry. We have about as many motor and bulbs as we need. (...) (((Lousy bulbs and motors, granted, but we've got 'em galore.))) "Today, worldwide annual production stands at 50 billion integrated circuits and 200 billion microprocessors (many of those special-purpose controllers that run things like car engines and telephones). Every last one of these chips runs on electric power. (...) Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, 3Com, Intel, AMD, Compaq and Dell have become the new General Electrics behind a resurgent demand for power. (((Nice of Forbes to publicly name the names of the offenders here.))) "Your typical PC and its peripherals require about 1,000 watts of power. An IntelliQuest study reports that the average Internet user is on-line 12 hours a week. (Most data relate to home users; business usage is very hard to pin down, but almost certainly is higher.) That kind of usage implies about 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electrical consumption in a year. (((Yep, that's *you* and your thousand filthy kilowatts they're indicting there, console cowboy and netsurfer girl.))) "There are already over 50 million PCs in households, and 150 million more computers in businesses. Another 36 million are sold each year with 20 million going on the Internet. "And for every piece of wired hardware on your desk, two or three pieces of equipment lurk in the network beyond == office hubs and servers, routers, repeaters, amplifiers, remote servers and so forth. ((("Makes the invisible visible" == read it and weep!))) "The heavy iron that powers a Schwab or Amazon typically requires a megawatt. There are already over 17,000 pure dot-com companies (Ebay, E-Trade, etc.). The larger ones each represent the electric load of small village. (((In a better world, they'd all be forced to announce this fact with a banner on the site. Or better yet == why don't we do this for them?))) "Getting the bits from dot-com to desktop requires still more electricity. Cisco's 7500 series router, for example, keeps the Web hot by routing an impressive 400 million bits per second, but to do that it needs 1.5 kilowatts of power. (...) (((Let's start publicly referring to them as "Crisco" until they stop burning oil.))) "Traffic on the Web has indeed been doubling every three months. About 17 million homes already have two or more PCs. Communicating chips are now migrating off the desktop. (...) "Just fabricating all these digital boxes requires a tremendous amount of electricity. The billion-dollar fabrication plants are packed with furnaces, pumps, dryers and ion beams, all electrically driven. It takes 9 kilowatt-hours to etch circuits onto a square inch of silicon, and about as much power to manufacture an entire PC (1,000 kilowatt-hours) as it takes to run it for a year. (We're counting just the things that really go into the box == chips, boards and so forth == not the water cooler or the rest of the surrounding infrastructure.) "A typical fab is already a 10- to 15-megawatt electric beast == about as big as a steel minimill, electrically speaking. And there are at least 300 of these factories in the U.S. Collectively, fabs and their suppliers currently consume nearly 1% of the nation's electric output. "A billion PCs on the Web means electric demand equal to total U.S. output today. (((A million of today's clumsy hog PC's would mean that, anyhow.))) "The infoelectric convergence is already having a visible impact on overall demand. At least 100 million nodes on the Internet, drawing from hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours per year, add up to 290 billion kWh of demand. "That's about 8% of total U.S. demand. Add in the electric power used to build and operate stand-alone (unnetworked) chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13%. It's now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade. (...) (((So with a clean Internet, we've got half the problem solved!))) "Futurists have been promising us an information highway, not unit trains loaded with coal. Fiber-optic cables, not 600-kilovolt power lines. We're going to get both." (((No we're not. I am "a futurist", and I'm promising you here and now that the 21st century Net is going to *violently devour* the senescent electrical industry. We're going to have smart, clean, decentralized energy, because the mandarins of the Net are too clever to sit still and passively cook in their own spew when they could run corporate rings around General Electric any nanosecond of the week. If there were truth-in-labelling for the ghastly smoke these big websites emit, clean energy market-demand would do the trick overnight. (((Or, alternately we could enjoy some kind a massive climatic social breakdown. In which case we won't need the coal trains either, because every electrical generator on the planet is gonna be taken out by Third World truck bombs and First World cruise missiles. Either way, it's a very different world than the one in Forbes May 1999.))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O EVERY TEN MEGABYTES BURNS FIVE POUNDS OF COAL O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O