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What do an avatar on Second Life and the average
inhabitant of Brazil in the real world have in common? Incredibly,
they both use the same amount of electricity.
It is perhaps not a fair example
as the average virtual being in the online community is not active
all the time, but the statistic does show that all that time the
rich world spends online has an impact on the environment.
And how. Providing energy to work
the Internet needs the equivalent of 14 power stations, which in
turn cough out the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions
as the airline industry, research has estimated.
This does not even include all
the emissions created by making PCs, mobile phones and PDAs and
shipping them around the planet. If you add the energy required to
recycle them -- not that that many are recycled -- the industry has
quite a footprint.
It is with this in focus that
CeBIT, the world's largest technology fair, opened its doors this
week in Hanover, Germany with 5,500 exhibitors showing off the
smartest, coolest -- and this year the greenest -- gadgets.
With oil and gas prices pushing
up energy bills, a main motivation is also cutting down the costs
for consumers and businesses.
IBM, for example, devoted large
parts of its stand at CeBIT, which runs to March 9, to showing how
its new servers use less energy.
Vast farms of servers made by IBM
and others are used to power the Internet, and it is these
gas-guzzling data centres of immense size and energy consumption
that drive Second Life and indeed the entire Internet.
Siegfried Behrendt, a researcher
at Berlin's IZT institute, calculates that downloading his daily
newspaper uses the same amount of electricity as running a washing
machine.
German IT firm Strato, meanwhile,
reckons that looking for something on Internet search engine Google
requires as much energy as an energy-efficient light-bulb uses in an
hour.
This won't show up on your
monthly electricity bill though, because most of the energy required
for these actions takes place in a server somewhere on a data farm.
And consumption is growing. A
study commissioned by US microchip maker AMD at Stanford University
in the United States calculated that between 2000 and 2004 data
farms' energy use doubled.
At this rate, in less than a
quarter century the Internet will consume as much energy as the
whole of humanity does today, Gerhard Fettweis from Dresden
University in Germany believes.
Between now and 2010,
"everything is possible. Either nothing changes, and the
consumption of data centres grows 50 percent. Or real efforts are
made, and a lowering of 50 percent is conceivable," Fettweis
told AFP.
Real efforts were on show at
CeBIT, raising hopes that innovation will find a way to lessen the
IT industry's environmental impact.
Data centres produce a huge
amount of heat but the rooms they are in also have to be kept cool
to avoid overheating.
IBM -- which also operates server
farms on behalf of other firms -- wants to capture that heat and use
it to power air conditioning to keep things cool.
And software giant Microsoft has
a data centre near Quincy in the United States -- right next to a
hydro-electric plant, providing its servers with renewable energy.
Another solution is so-called
virtualisation of servers, a technique whereby special software
turns spare capacity on the server to function as multiple
computers.
-- AFP
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