The Digital Economy Is a Massive, Escalating Energy Suck

Unlike the hum of the refrigerator or the buzz of a light bulb, you can't hear the energy consumption while you're browsing Facebook from your smartphone. So it's easy to forget that our growing digital universe is actually using more electricity than things like heating and lighting, often targeted by environmental activists.

According to a new report from the Digital Power Group, the global IT economy consumes about 1,500 TWh of electricity—roughly the amount used to light up the entire world in 1985. What’s more, the number is expected to rise incredibly fast, as the information sector and electronics industries boom.

Here are a few more alarming statistics from the report to mull over: It takes more electricity to power an iPhone for a year than a refrigerator, and if you add an hour of mobile streaming video each week, make it two refrigerators. The world is on track to use more energy for electricity than anything else other than transportation—a threshold the US crossed in 1995. Already, we use 50 percent more energy to move bytes around the world than airplanes.

None of this is terribly shocking—they're called "electronics" after all. But it's worth taking a good long look at, especially as a spate of emerging trends like the wireless cloud, smart devices, big data, and wearable tech promise to fast-track society’s demand for electricity.

DIGITAL POWER

The most tangible digital power hog is consumer tech—smartphones, laptops, digital TVs. While plugging in an iPhone to charge for a few hours isn’t taking up that much energy, the power consumption shoots up with heavy use—streaming video or games, say, or running multiple apps at once, the report points out. With each new version that rolls out, devices have more capabilities and more power. You might have noticed that your laptop or phone lose their charge more quickly these days, because you’re running so many programs at once, and faster than ever. That takes energy.

Chances are, the trend will continue, fueled by our “always on” digital culture. You can only heat your house so hot, or drive your car so far, but there’s no foreseeable limit to owning gadgets or being plugged into the web. In fact, even the gadgets are, increasingly, plugged into the web, 24/7.

That leads us to the second power hog, data, which we all know is multiplying at exponential rates. Before long, according to the report, hourly internet traffic is expected to exceed the annual internet traffic in the year 2000, particularly as more of the developing world becomes wired.

"Since all digital bits are electrons…astronomical quantities of data eventually add up to real power in the real world," the report states. The hoards of information produced by our digital lifestyles and industries is stored in energy-sucking data centers. According to “How Green Is Your Cloud?”, a Greenpeace report published last year, "The average square foot of a cloud data center uses 100 to 200 times more electricity than does a square foot of a modern office building." The group estimated that the amount of electricity needed to run just one data center could power nearly 180,000 homes.

The third power hog is wireless access to the cloud, which is, you guessed it, also growing rapidly. Smartphone and tablet prices are dropping, and ownership is spreading around the world. (Hell, even North Korea has a smartphone now.) That means more people accessing the internet wirelessly or via 3G. Per the report:

Mobile data traffic doubled in the past year and is forecast to rise 10-fold in five years. The same amount of data carried on wireless networks consumes far more energy than when transported on 'wires' (fiber optics).

The disconcerting irony here is that even as social trends cause more people to live green lifestyles—buying the eco-friendly soap and the Prius, shutting off all the lights when you leave the house, keeping the house at 65 instead of 73—these laudable efforts could be counteracted by the digital societal trends happening simultaneously—watching more movies and TV on laptops or digital sets, spending more and more hours on the internet and mobile devices.

TIME illustrated this point nicely, citing a recent New Republic article that found the greenest building in New York—kitted out with all the latest energy-efficient architectural bells and whistles, like waterless urinals and daylight dimming controls—actually had higher energy consumption per square foot than its similarly sized counterparts. Why? The rows and rows of computers—sometimes three per desk—plus IT equipment and servers powering the office building’s trading floors.

“Assuming no one turns these computers off, in a year one of these desks uses roughly the energy it takes a 25-mile-per-gallon car engine to travel more than 4,500 miles. The servers supporting all those desks also require enormous energy, as do the systems that heat, cool and light the massive trading floors beyond normal business hours,” TNR reported.

A CLEANER CLOUD

So what does all this mean for the environment? Right now, coal is fueling the lion's share of electricity in the world, which is why the research report was sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, most likely in an attempt to illustrate coal’s important role in powering the future.

But many groups have advocated for looking into alternative energy sources to lower the digital economy’s carbon footprint. The silver lining of the fast-growing energy suck could be that it forces the issue. Can clean energy power the cloud?

In Greenpeace’s report, the nonprofit called on big tech companies to take responsibility and make better energy choices. It wrote that a meaningful strategy to clean the cloud must include both “direct investing and purchasing of renewable energy” and “demanding from governments and electric utilities to change the policy."

Google, for its part, held a summit in June to study the environmental impact of the internet. It found—from its somewhat biased viewpoint—that migrating more workers and industries to cloud services could actually save energy by consolidating servers and making data centers more efficient.

The web giant sponsored a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that found “if all US business users shifted their email, productivity, software, and CRM software to the cloud, the primary energy footprint of these software applications might be reduced by as much as 87 percent.”

If all else fails, there’s always the hope that somewhere in the gargantuan cloud of power-hungry digital information lay the answers for how to reduce its impact on the planet.