The Internet’s Energy Consumption and Its Carbon Footprint

Over the past few years there has been an ongoing debate about the growing amount of energy needed to power the World Wide Web, a.k.a the Internet, and the impacts on our environment.  Many have tried to pin down the exact amount of energy needed to power the internet and its carbon footprint. Recently The Guardian published an article saying that the Internet’s carbon footprint was around 300 million tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to every person in the UK flying to America and back twice over.

The article was published in August and with the number of internet users growing by the day worldwide I wouldn’t be surprised if these figures were higher nowadays.  According to the UN by the end of the year there will be 2 billion world internet users, that is 1/6 of world population.

Hypothetically, if these growth rates remain the same, the entire world would be online by 2020.

To measure the Internet’s exact power consumption and then determine its carbon footprint we would need to know the precise number of computers, laptops and mobile phones that are online these days (which we don’t). Add that to the amount of energy consumed by all the Data Centres worldwide to then determine the internet power consumption and its carbon footprint.

Scary isn’t it? But we gathered some data just to give you a better understanding of roughly how much energy is needed to power the World Wide Web these days.

Back in 2006, data centres in America consumed a total of 61,000,000,000 kWh (yes you read it right 61 trillion kWh), which is enough to power the UK for 2 whole months.

A single Google search produces 0.2g of CO2. Not that much right? But now, 3,100,000 Google searches emit enough CO2 to power an average house for a whole month.

The monthly searches processed by Google produce 260 tons of CO2 which is equivalent to power an American fridge-freezer for 5,400 years. This consumes 3,900,000 kWh of energy, which is equal to washing 5.57 million loads of laundry.

But wait, it gets worse! A single spam message produces the equivalent of 0.3 grams of CO2. Multiply that by 62 trillion pieces of spam circling the World Wide Web each year and we have the emissions equivalent of driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.

Despite its huge energy consumption the internet is likely to play an important role as we move towards a low carbon economy. Thanks to advances in communication technologies an estimated 40% of the working population could work from home. If 40% of American workforce worked from home twice a week, carbon emission would be reduced by 53 million metric tons year, equivalent of taking 10 million cars on the road.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.

Is Facebook Responsible For Higher Energy Bills?

As a market leading energy broker we have noticed that the current generation is more committed to discovering and reducing its carbon footprint than ever before.  But despite this growing awareness and our need to conserve and reduce our energy consumption, there is one thing that has changed our lifestyle, and increased our energy consumption like nothing else we have ever seen before.  Facebook, the social networking site accounted for 1 in every 10 internet visits in September – up 4% from the same month last year, now overtaking popular search engines such as Google in the rankings.

Astonishingly Facebook now attracts 55% of all visits to social networking sites but others such as Twitter, Linkedin and Tumblr have seen visits at least double in the last 12-months, a recent report suggested.

With all of this increased online activity comes an obvious need for an increased supply of electricity, both from the millions of online users, to the huge new data centers needed to host all of this data.  With its membership now passing the 500-million mark back in July, the storage and transmitting of messages, pictures and other information through Facebook uses a vast and still rapidly increasing amount of energy, as the network continues to expand its worldwide operations.

And with 4.5 billion updates posted to Facebook every week, the vast amount of energy needed for all of this online activity is enormous.

One of the pricing fundamentals of any commodity is the supply and demand factor, and with any increased demand, we see an impact on the supply and eventually the cost.

Because of Facebook’s rapid growth, their new hosting facility will need to be twice the size of its previous data centre, and to compound this issue the main source of electricity for the site is from coal fired power stations, the largest source of global warming pollution.

But this problem isn’t just limited just to Facebook, as the demand for cloud based applications grows Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others are investing billions of dollars to build new data centers to meet their growing demand for Web services, adding to the world pollution from computing.

In fact a recent study has estimated that the average user now spends at least 7-hours a month on Facebook alone, and reports suggest that this desire for social networking is set to increase further over the coming years.

Given that energy is an expensive and rising cost, these service providers do have a financial and environmental motivation to use as little electricity as possible.

But the implications for increased online activity is unlike anything that we have ever experienced before in our life times, and our desire and hunger for further social media interaction wont stop here.

Facebook is set to launch its latest Google taunting product on Monday, the long anticipated Facebook email system. The launch of an @facebook.com email is not itself a great surprise, as the existence of a secret project officially known as Project Titan has been circulating since February.

We just hope that our dwindling business energy supplies can cope long term with all of this increased use of energy.

More Facebook Facts

• Facebook like served a billion likes in the first 24 hours after its launch
• To put your friend count in perspective, the average user has 130
• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, while the current active official user count now stands at over 500 million.
• More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.
• There are more than 800,000 developers building applications for Facebook.
• 70% of Facebook users live outside of the US.
• Yahoo! tried to buy Facebook in 2006 for $1,000,000,000.
• 8,300,000,000 hours are spent on Facebook monthly.
• Facebook was originally bankrolled by a co-founder of Paypal for $500,000

Please add your comments below as we would love to know your thoughts on this for you and your business.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

Name:

Email:

We respect your email privacy

Ofgem’s new Unit spent more than £5m on energy consultants

Last week Ofgem quietly announced on its website the details of expenditures on external energy consultants.  In just six months the energy regulator spent over £5m on new green taxes and incentives that ranged from feed-in-tariffs to smart meters.

Ofgem has an annual budget of £50m, if spending continues at the same rate by the end of the year the amount spent with external consultants will account for 20% of its total budget.

To administer environmental programmes and sustainability projects Ofgem created a special unit called, Ofgem E-Serve. The “E” stands for Environment, Energy and Efficiency. The new unit has used external consultants on 63 different occasions between April and September this year accounting for the total sum of £5m.

The details were quietly published on Ofgem’s website last week, ahead of new rules forcing state-funded organisations to detail all spending of more than £25,000. Among the highest paid sums is an energy consultancy company that pocket a total of £1.4m.

A spokesman for the regulator said: “Ofgem is unique among Britain’s regulators in capping its costs to 3% below inflation. This and other savings has saved more than £11m.”

On top of that, the value of schemes Ofgem has to manage has rocketed from £150m a year to £4bn. Such increase required a significant investment to be able to deliver these projects.

More about Ofgem E-Serve

Ofgem E-Serve focuses on administering environmental programmes and the delivery of sustainability projects such as offshore electricity transmission. Already running a £15bn offshore transmission tendering regime and many environmental programmes and services (some £3bn per year) and this is expected to more than double in the next decade.

Operation of Environmental Programmes (Existing Schemes) sits under the newly created role of Group Finance Director along with the support services covering HR, Information Management and Technology, Finance and Risk Management, Procurement, Building Services and Project Management. Development and implementation of the Offshore and Smart Metering projects sits under the newly created role of Commercial Managing Director along with Legal, and New Scheme Development.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Please add your comments below as we would love to know your thoughts on this subject.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.

Our monthly analysis of the UK gas and power markets is now available on line for the month of November 2010. The service is intended to keep you up to date with all the major news in Europe’s gas and power markets. It is also designed to keep power executives focused on market activity in an easy to digest format.

Your find our November 2010 report here and all historical energy reports can be located here.

If you would like more information on our services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.

New Government Scheme to Aid Small Businesses Become Greener

In a bid to help small and middle sized businesses improve their energy efficiency the Government is preparing a multi-billion pound fund that will help more than 4m businesses across the land to become “greener”.

The main idea behind this scheme is to finance loans to small and middle sized businesses so they can replace energy hungry equipment with more energy efficient ones improving their overall business energy efficiency. The loans will then be repaid from the savings made in their energy bills.

Entitled “The Green Deal for Business” the scheme is a joint venture between the private and public sector. White hall representatives are discussing with high street banks and business energy providers such as British Gas how to generate the funds and administer it.

Kanat Emiroglu, managing director of British Gas Business (BGB), said: “We are talking to the Government about its energy efficiency scheme for SMEs [small or medium-sized enterprises]. They are very receptive about it.  I am hoping it will be introduced in a way that’s not bureaucratic.”

And concluded:

“There should be something in the Queen’s Speech in November, in the Energy Bill.”

The installation of modern and more energy efficient plant machinery has been proven to generate great savings and it is with this data that the Government plans to form the basis of a loan programme.

“Lenders need confidence that they would be repaid and data from businesses that already use energy efficient equipments provide such confidence” – stated Catalyst’s Energy Broker Chris Hurcombe.

Initial plans are to provide £94bn to British businesses by next February under legally binding agreements. In order to achieve such figures the Government is negotiating the involvement of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group.

British Gas is so confident that the scheme will work that it is prepared to put £20m up front. Mr Emiroglu said British Gas was examining how to isolate the energy savings accrued by a piece of equipment to take into account the fact that energy consumption may rise or fall for other business reasons.

On the other hand he noted that Existing government-funded initiatives, such as the Carbon Trust’s interest-free loans to small businesses, had not worked.

“The Carbon Trust has only touched a tiny percentage of SMEs. I would guess its less than 1%,”

According to British Gas Business thousands of companies face fines totalling up to £15m for failing to register their energy use with the Environment Agency.

To sum things up we leave you a reminder that if your company uses more than £500,000 of electricity a year it has to sign up to the Carbon Reduction Commitment by September 30^th 2010.

We want to hear from you now. What do you have to say about the Government’s new scheme “The Green Deal for Business” ? Will it be suitable for your business?

Or if you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.

Carbon Management equals Commercial Opportunity

Carbon management becomes strategic business priority for the world’s largest global corporations says the 2010 Carbon Disclosure Project’s 2010 Global 500 report

The Climate Week NYºC 2010 started on Monday and activities will go on till Sunday the 26th of September. During the whole week business leaders, government officials and NOG’s representatives from around the world will discuss key issues and explore solutions to ensure a cleaner, greener and more prosperous future for us all.

This year’s central theme is “Climate Innovation = Commercial Opportunity”. Celebrations started with an opening ceremony at the New York Public Library that drew about 300 people.  But the very first forum was held at the Bank of America headquarters where the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) announced the 2010 Global 500 report.

The CDP’s Global 500 report ranks companies according to their carbon reduction commitments on a 100-point scale. It analyses how each organisation is measuring and managing its carbon emissions, how it discloses information to stakeholders and above all what they are doing to reduce their carbon footprint.

Among the five corporations scoring highest in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) latest rankings released today, are Siemens, Deutsche Post, BASF, Bayer and Samsung Electronics. Highlights to Germany’s Siemens who scored the highest this year, achieving a near-perfect 98 out of 100.

The CDP’s 2010 Global 500 report and new Carbon Reporting Leadership Index (CPLI) key findings were:

• 85% of the carbon performance leaders surveyed reported have board or senior executive level responsibility for climate change
• 48% are now embedding climate change initiatives into the overall business strategy and across the organization
• 9 out of 10 companies surveyed identified significant commercial opportunity arising from climate change, separating the companies driven by risk factors, from those that are identifying and seizing competitive advantages and cost-benefits
• 65% of Global 500 respondents are implementing emissions reduction targets. However, only 19% of the Global 500 companies are showing significant emissions reductions
• North America significantly lags Europe in disclosure and performance: 21% of European respondents are in the CPLI, compared to 6% of North American respondents
• Leading companies see two main areas of focus for action: the energy efficiency of operations, likely encouraged by cost savings potential, and the development of innovative products and services that enable customers to cut their emissions

“Fuelled by opportunities to reduce energy costs, secure energy supply, protect the business from climate change risk and reputational damage, generate revenue and remain competitive, carbon management continues to rise as a strategic priority for many businesses. Companies globally are seizing commercial carbon opportunities, often acting ahead of any policy requirements. More companies than ever before are reporting through CDP and measuring and reporting their emissions, which is the first building block in working towards a low-carbon economy” aid Paul Dickson CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Dickson also noted that despite the failure of the world’s political leaders to come up with a new climate change agreement, the private sector is embracing the need for carbon emissions reductions. He went on to say “heavy disappointment at the failure to reach agreement on a global deal at Copenhagen and smears against climate change science.”

About the Carbon Disclosure Project

The Carbon Disclosure Project was launched over a decade ago at No. 10 Downing Street in London, when the residence was occupied by Prime Minister Tony Blair. This independent not-for-profit organization holds the largest database of primary corporate climate change information in the world.

If you would like more information on our range of energy broker services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.

Our monthly analysis of the UK gas and power markets is now available on line for the month of September 2010. The service is intended to keep you up to date with all the major news in Europe’s gas and power markets. It is also designed to keep power executives focused on market activity in an easy to digest format.

Your find our September 2010 report here and all historical energy reports can be located here.

If you would like more information on our services or would like to find out how this could benefit your business, simply call our energy team today on 0870 710 7560 or request a call back at time to suit.

Follow us on Twitter | Become a Fan on Facebook

Or you might want to subscribe for further updates direct from our site.

.

.