Are you sitting comfortably? Good, because you’re about to get a good old-fashioned dose of guilt. The folks at SciShow have put together a video examining how much energy we waste on running the internet, and the number is embarrassingly large.
As the video explains, loading videos of people falling off rooftops (and, y’know, running the stock market) takes servers — which use a lot of energy, some 91 billion kilowatt-hours in the US alone. And, worst of all, a bunch of those servers are just sitting there, unused, waiting for a data request to come in. Cooling those servers — being used or otherwise — is hugely energy inefficient.
SciShow’s video is a good primer on the topic, but if you want a more in-depth explainer on data centres (and their shocking inefficiency — running servers only accounts for 11 per cent or so of the actual power usage), Dan Luu has a more in-depth look at the topic. Just be ready to feel an overwhelming sense of moral inferiority every time you log onto Reddit from now on. [YouTube]