ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF A DIGITAL PLANET

May 19, 2019

According to France's CNRS research centre, it takes 25 watts per hour, representing 20 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions to send a one-megabyte email.

Key findings of the report:

  • Sending 1 MB e-mail takes around 25 watts per hour, representing 20 gm of carbon dioxide emissions. It is expected that 293 billion emails will be sent every single day this year and the power will be mostly generated from fossil fuels.

  • The share of greenhouse gas emissions from information and communication technologies (ICT) will rise from 2.5% in 2013 to 4% in 2020. That makes the sector more carbon-intensive than civil aviation (a 2% share of emissions in 2018) and on track to reach automobiles (8%).

  • Apps can quickly drain and shorten the life of phone batteries.

  • Then there are the server farms which require huge amounts of electricity both to run and to power air-conditioning which keeps the equipment from getting too hot.

  • The surge in Video streaming services poses a challenge. In 2017, Greenpeace estimated that the viral K-pop sensation Gangnam Style, viewed more than 2.7 billion times, had consumed a year’s worth of production from a small nuclear power plant.

Source : The Hindu