Googling Heats the Earth up

Internet searches, Chats and computer games devour a lot of energy.

The ecologically harmful effects of computers are not widely recognized. Large amounts of greenhouse gases are produced while generating power for computers. "A visit to an internet site causes an emission of about 20mg carbon dioxide per second," says physicist Alex Wissner Gross who draws up eco-balance sheets for websites.

Experts disagree about the extent of environmental pollution. Google works on the assumption that each search produces about 0.2g carbon dioxide emissions. If one multiplies this figure with the 103 million queries in Germany daily, the result adds up to 20 tonnes per day in just one country. However, this figure only reflects the energy consumption of one server. According to the American business consultancy Gartner, taking all IT activities into consideration the virtual world is responsible for about 2 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.

Virtual game worlds like second life, for instance, are very wasteful. At any given time there are between 10,000 and 15,000 artificial figures, known as avatars, active. Multiplied with the energy requirements of personal computers (120w), servers (200w) as well as air-conditioning for the servers (about 50w each), this adds up to 60,000kw hours (kWh) or 1,752 kWh per head per year. So an avatar consumes as much energy as an average as an average Mexican did in 2002: 2,280 kWh.

However invaluable computers are in the field of environment research, they do not need a lot of energy, they do need a lot of energy, particularly supercomputers (see opposite page). It will probably be a while before an environmentally neutral mainframe computer is developed.

source : GEO Magazine