The internet alone consumes over three times as much electricity as renewables produce...

[GliderGuider]

Yet another problem of economies of scale (with a to William Stanley Jevons)

http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/another-blog-post-costing-the-earth/

I was prompted to visit this subject because I was asked for a citation for a comment I made on good old facebook that there was not enough renewable energy installed globally to run the internet, let alone doing all the other stuff ‘green people’ think will be achieved using solar and wind. Like making steel without coal, can you believe it? in fact, I was way off the mark…… the internet consumes three times as much energy as renewables produce!

So even before the stuff that goes into making computers and phones and modems and servers and whatever else goes into making our hi-tech lifestyle – like, let us not forget, the very renewables that are assumed by many to power the future – said renewables are again found very wanting…….

The source for this information is Low Tech Magazine, in an article titled Why We Need a Speed Limit for the Internet which starts with:

In terms of energy conservation, the leaps made in energy efficiency by the infrastructure and devices we use to access the internet have allowed many online activities to be viewed as more sustainable than offline.

On the internet, however, advances in energy efficiency have a reverse effect: as the network becomes more energy efficient, its total energy use increases. This trend can only be stopped when we limit the demand for digital communication.

Keeping all this in mind, we selected what seems to be the most recent, complete, honest and transparent report of the internet's total footprint. It concludes that the global communications network consumed 1,815 TWh of electricity in 2012. This corresponds to 8% of global electricity production in the same year (22,740 TWh).

1,815 TWh equals three times the electricity supplied by all wind and solar energy plants in 2012, worldwide.

To me, this sounds just like Jevons’ Paradox all over again….. and I’m not surprised either. As I continually go on about, nothing we do is sustainable. I’ve been on the internet ever since its early inception when dial up was as good as it got. And I remember that back then, loading web pages was actually no slower than it is now with high speed broadband. The reason for this is that as speed increased, websites got fatter. A bit like cars, houses, and people have over the past 20 years. Consumption rules, the more the better, the economy needs it!

[RiverLover]

1. Well then, we just need to produce more of our energy from renewables.

That seems self-evident to me.

[GliderGuider]

3. Do you understand the concept of positive feedback loops?

That idea is crucial if you want to understand what's actually going on, and where to intervene in human systems to shape their behaviour in the direction you desire. Unless you understand how positive feedback loops operate in human behaviour (especially our social behaviour), you'll largely be poking about in the dark, trying unsuccessfully to make others conform to your personal ideology.

You have to make a choice. Do you just want to feel like you're right and others are wrong, or do you want to be an effective change agent? If it's the latter, it helps to know a lot about human psychology and complex systems.

[RiverLover]

5. Look in the mirror

Do you just want to feel like you're right and others are wrong, or do you want to be an effective change agent?

[bananas]

7. You mean like your peak oil predictions?

Kind of fucking hypocritical of you to be talking down to Riverlover like that, considering how wrong you were about peak oil and nuclear energy.

It almost sounds like you're trying to use your deep understanding of human psychology and social behaviour to manipulate him into falling for some weird bullshit.

I hope he doesn't fall for it!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x251383

[RiverLover]

9. Thanks for the link, bananas.

(She) isn't falling for it.

[GliderGuider]

12. I speak my mind at the time

Then I watch and learn from what actually happens. If events prove me wrong, then I change my mind. Where exactly is the disgrace in that? Yes, I was excessively ardent about PO, renewables and nuclear.

As for talking down to people, that shot wasn't aimed just at RL. Most people (including most people here on DU) have no fucking clue why positive feedback loops, complex systems science or the psychology of social behaviour are crucial to success. That failure causes us to try and apply leverage at exactly the wrong points in the system to effect the changes we desire.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows

In order to make it work, you have to really understand the system. Most people don't. Politicians and advertisers come close.

I find myself talking over the heads of a lot of people. I've run out of fucks to give about that.

[NNadir]

44. This remark comes from a member of the set of people who have cheered at the waste of...

...nearly two trillion dollars on the toxic, failed, and useless solar and wind energy in the last ten years, while that toxic garbage produces not even five of the 560 exajoules consumed by humanity each year, the set of people who have giggled while predicting that some nuclear disaster somewhere some day will kill as many people as die from air pollution every damn day while they giggle.

See reference 2

Tough shit. All the cheering and wishing and predictions over the last half a century that nuclear energy would kill as many people as will die today from air pollution - toxic, deadly rhetoric, hasn't been borne out by something generally known in some circles as "reality."

Congratulations, by the way, on your grand announcement that someone, finally somewhere got cancer from Fukushima. Ex-Fukushima No. 1 worker sues Tepco over cancer One hopes your orgasm wasn't too messy, and that there wasn't too many dibenzofurans in the gooey stuff from the coal, gas, and oil pollutants we all breathe while twits carry on decade after decade predicting the grand solar and wind future. It would be interesting, by the way, if unexpectedly ethical, if you gave a shit about the 186,000 people who will get lung cancer from air pollution this year as reported in Nature this year, but the number of dumb, morally vapid, paranoid, and frankly fatal anti-nukes who have the ethical, intellectual, or emotional depth to open a science book or a science journal and find out what's happening to humanity is zero.

Zero.

One can only shake one's head in moral disgust at the people who bullshitted us into this disaster with bad thinking, paranoia, and frankly, deadly laziness.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Do drop by to burn some coal and gas derived electricity to predict again that someday the entire solar industry, built in the last half a century while racing to mine the last gram of cadmium, will produce as much energy as the gas industry's growth this year.

[bananas]

4. Nope - renewables provided 22% of electrical generation in 2013

That's a lot more than the 8% consumed by the internet in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy

Based on REN21's 2014 report, renewables contributed 19 percent to our global energy consumption and 22 percent to our electricity generation in 2012 and 2013, respectively. This energy consumption is divided as 9% coming from traditional biomass, 4.2% as heat energy (non-biomass), 3.8% hydro electricity and 2% is electricity from wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass.

[GliderGuider]

8. How much energy did the internet consume in 2013? nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. What is "the internet?" (No, seriously…)

Are we talking about the wires, fiber, switches and routers?

Are we including data centers, and the servers they hold?

Are we including personal computers with a network connection?

Are we including consumer devices like smart phones? Network-connected video games? What about a WiFi-connected thermostat?

[GliderGuider]

13. Routers, switches, servers and endpoint devices (i.e. all computers and smart phones)

Doesn't need to be that accurate - a figure with a +/- 10 terawatt-hour error bar would do nicely.

[OKIsItJustMe]

17. But, I had a personal computer long before I had a (telephone) modem

Now, I have a cable modem. Do I count the cable TV infrastructure which pre-existed the internet?

My point is I believe that determining the power used by “the internet” is (ahem) “problematic.”

That being said, I am stunned (for example) by the emergence of the public “charging station.” hundreds of millions of people (Nielsen estimated that in 2013, ⅔'s of Americans owned a smartphone) need to charge their smart phones rather frequently. Let’s call that roughly 5Wh a phone… charged every other day… let’s say 2½Wh/phone/day for… what? ½ GW-h/day for the US!?

The typical cable modem runs at about 12W, and most of them are on 24 hours a day, so let’s call that ¼kWh/modem/day…

But here’s the amazing thing, at the same time as we’ve added these new ways to use energy, per capita energy use in the US is dropping…
http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/per-capita-electricity-consumption-7b888/resource/ab4d35e6-4ad1-429f-a913-009705653bf9
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec1_13.pdf
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=WDI&f=Indicator_Code%3aEG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Now, I wonder, how much of that drop is due to the internet?

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

30. I would imagine some of that drop is lighting and other home appliances.

I used to run 300W every time I turned on the bedroom lights. Now, thanks to LEDs, I run around 40W I believe, and, as an added bonus, haven't blown any fuses in years. All of my appliances are more energy efficient than they used to be. Heck, my water bill dropped by 10 bucks a month when I upgraded my washing machine, and I've got to be saving electricity simply from not moving nearly as much water around. I actually even run fewer computers than I used to, since the ones I still run are more efficient and can multitask without slowing down the other things I'm working on.

[OKIsItJustMe]

31. I expect so as well

Of course, if “Jevons’ Paradox” is to be believed, thanks to that additional efficiency of our lights, our energy use should be going up!

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

33. I think it's offset by social training.

I assume the Paradox would suggest that people are more likely to just leave LED lighting on all the time, but a lot of us are socialized to turn off lights we're not using, whether or not they're energy efficient.

[OKIsItJustMe]

36. Jevons Paradox asserts…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

… "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." …

(Greater energy efficiency leads to greater energy use.) So, yes, since it costs less for you to leave your houselights on, you will leave more of them on, for longer, thereby using more electricity. (Or… the money you save on lighting, you will consume some other way, like leaving your cable modem on 24 hours a day. Of course, in 24 hours, your cable modem probably uses less power than one of your old incandescant light bulbs, left on for the evening…)

[GliderGuider]

14. That includes hydro. The article was talking about wind and solar.

The figures I have for from BP for 2014 are: Hydro: 16.5%; Wind&Solar: 3.8%

Here's the data from BP for 2000 to 2014:

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. These figures are apparently radically different from the US

According to the EIA: http://www.eia.gov/renewable/

In 2014:
Hydroelectric power provided 2.467 quadrillion BTU
Wind provided 1.750 quadrillion BTU
Solar provided 0.426 quadrillion BTU

[GliderGuider]

19. Yes, the world figures are quite a bit different from the US numbers.

Per BP for 2014:

USA:
Hydro: 261.4 TWh
Wind: 183.6 TWh
Solar: 18.5 TWh


World:
Hydro: 3884.6 TWh
Wind: 706.2 TWh
Solar: 185.9 TWh

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. What’s wrong with this picture?

According to the BP figures, wind provided 10 times as much as solar.

According to the EIA, wind provided about 4 times as much as solar.

[GliderGuider]

22. Are you comparing the the global usage figures in both cases?

It sounds to me like the EIA numbers are just for American usage. BP says that in the USA wind provided 3.8 times more electricity than solar, while for the world wind provided 9.9 times more than solar.

[OKIsItJustMe]

25. I’m comparing figures you cited for the US from BP, to figures I cited for the US from EIA

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112792982#post19

Per BP for 2014:

USA:
Hydro: 261.4 TWh
Wind: 183.6 TWh
Solar: 18.5 TWh

183.6 ÷ 18.5 = 9.92

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112792982#post18

In 2014:
Hydroelectric power provided 2.467 quadrillion BTU
Wind provided 1.750 quadrillion BTU
Solar provided 0.426 quadrillion BTU

1.750 ÷ 0.426 = 4.11



Perhaps the difference is solar thermal? (e.g. solar water heating…)

[GliderGuider]

39. Yes, the BP data is for electricity only. nt

[RiverLover]

6. Digital is a train that can't be stopped, much like population growth

I work for a large corporation. This is from an email we got the other day~

The Global Learning Organization (GLO) is coordinating a day focused on increasing our associates’ digital quotient. We are asking everyone to spend some time to learn how to be more digital. Even digital natives can take the time to learn something new about the digital world and think about how to apply it on the job.

How can you participate?

• Increase your digital savviness: Launch My Learning Network, search for the following three Project Sync online training courses and complete them if you have not already done so.
o Digital By Design
o Understanding Digital Technology

The digital age is here & we need to work with it. To say we need to slow it down is not going to slow it down, ever. Its ridiculous. We need to end fossil fuels as our major energy source. Period.

[GliderGuider]

10. No, we won't stop it.

I spent 20 years from 1981 to 2001 working as a firmware R&D manager, working on packet switches and core routers - including one of the world's very first 100mbps Ethernet switches. The internet is the single most amazing thing that human beings have ever invented, hands down.

But nature always bats last. IMO we will never power our global civilization from wind, solar, hydro and geothermal electricity. But nothing on Earth will stop us from trying - except, in the end, the Earth herself.

[Binkie The Clown]

15. It seems that whenever you tell people how completely screwed we are...

they run screaming with their fingers in their ears, or shout fairy tales about man's omnipotence and invulnerability.

Disclaimer: I know that by using the Internet (and driving my car, and running my air conditioner on hot days, etc. etc.) I am contributing to the demise of civilization, but as I see it...

Buddha told a parable in sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

There's not one thing I can do to change the fate of the human race, especially with the vast majority in denial. So I've decided to simply watch the show and take what pleasure I can from the good things in life.

Eagerly awaiting the next plot twist.

[GliderGuider]

16. People have a problem distinguishing between

Appreciating every moment, and "Party on, dude!"

The man on the vine was appreciating the moment.

[sue4e3]

20. You do realize everyone has always just been watching the show , long before we were ever aware of a

a possible/probable climate crisis. No one has been promised any thing and no one gets out of life alive. No one really knows what or when any thing can happen to them with or with out global warming

[OKIsItJustMe]

23. … Jevons, his “Paradox,” and the horse they rode in on…

According to Jevons, thanks to increased efficiency, our energy use should be going up, not down.
http://www.eia.gov/consumption/
http://www.eia.gov/beta/MER/?tbl=T02.06#/?f=M

[GliderGuider]

24. What are your system boundaries?

It's not easy to debunk a global economy with a single national graph. Got global figures?

[OKIsItJustMe]

26. *Our* consumption should be going up due to greater efficiency!

Last edited Fri Oct 30, 2015, 04:06 PM - Edit history (1)

Other nations are using more energy. Is their increased energy use all due to our greater efficiency?

[GliderGuider]

40. Is their increased energy use all due to our greater efficiency? Exactly so.

It happens because money flows across borders more easily than any commodity, and flows into and out of all sectors of the economy with essentialy equal ease.

You save money due to efficiency, the saved money goes into the financial system; banks then invest it in growth in other countries, and their consumption grows. The monetization of all economic activity the underlying reason it works, and is also the reason the effect is hard to isolate down to a single commodity. Efficiency in both material and energy usage of all kinds gets amalgamated as dollars, fed into the system and helps the global economy grow.

[OKIsItJustMe]

41. I am familiar with the (supposed) rebound effect.

It’s an engaging narrative. — It seems possible. — That doesn’t make it true.

Jevons suggested that more efficient steam engines caused an increase in the use of coal. He was wrong. The key to the success of Watt’s steam engine was not its efficiency—as implied by Jevons. It was its usefulness. Earlier steam engines simply weren’t very good.

Why are other nations using more energy? Is it because we are using less?

Following your line of reasoning, we should see that as our use of energy goes down, energy use by our major trading partners should increase. Here are a number of our top trading partners:
http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/

• China’s energy use has skyrocketed, but it was skyrocketing before we lowered our energy use.
• Mexico’s energy use has climbed, but not like China’s.
• Japan’s energy use resembles our own.
• Germany’s energy use has not jumped.
• Our #1 trading partner, Canada does not seem to have been affected much by our pattern of energy use.

Your proposition does not seem to be supported by the facts.

[GliderGuider]

42. I'm not here to talk you into believing things.

I would say that complex systems are called that because they're ... complex. As I said, it's hard to isolate the monetization and growth effects down to single commodities, because the global economy is a fully integrated system. I've laid out how I think material, energy (and labor...) efficiencies facilitate global growth. It doesn't matter one way or the other if you don't agree with my views.

[OKIsItJustMe]

43. I have offered evidence against your claim.

Can you offer evidence in favor?

(Waving your hands and saying “it’s a complex system” is not evidence.)

[GliderGuider]

45. Why should I rebut your opinions? Would it change anything?

Why on earth should I feel obliged to defend my personal views? If you don't agree with them, if you can't see what I'm talking about, more "evidence" won't make any difference to you or the world. I don't argue on the internet any more. IMO that's puerile, ego-driven self-aggrandizing behaviour. I used to, but with a bit of work I'm getting over the urge. Now I try to I present my views, talk about them if anyone is interested, and move on. As I said before, I'm all out of fucks to give about others' opinions of me or my views.

You're happy where you are, and you appear to have no unfulfilled inner needs that my opinions will help to satisfy. I'm not here to be your intellectual whipping boy. Just not interested.

[OKIsItJustMe]

28. Debunking the Jevons Paradox: Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded

https://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/02/16/207532/debunking-jevons-paradox-jim-barrett/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Debunking the Jevons Paradox: Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded[/font]

by Climate Guest Contributor Feb 16, 2011 11:53am

[font size=3]The “Jevons paradox,” asserts that increasing “the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.” It is mostly if not entirely bunk, as the scientific literature and leading experts have demonstrated many times (see “Efficiency lives “” the rebound effect, not so much“).

…[/font][/font]

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. Eh.

I think the lesson to be learned is that we need to turn off our computers rather than leaving them on all the time. But power consumption is only going to increase in ways related to usage. People who mostly type text, for instance, are not going to be using more energy - if anything, they're using more energy efficient equipment than they used 25 years ago while still typing text.

And faster bandwidth means little when typing, because you still type a lot slower than the bandwidth anyway, at least since the days when we measured in baud.

Actually YouTube and similar services are to blame - forcing users to routinely redownload videos over and over to run 'playlists', or to watch them over and over, rather than to simply download them once and keeping them locally.

[OKIsItJustMe]

29. Which is more efficient?

For millions of people to download videos from YouTube and store them all locally, requiring them to buy spinning storage devices. Or, for YouTube to store one copy of each of the videos allowing people to get away with (relatively) small solid-state storage devices?

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

32. SSD drives are getting cheaper and holding more.

But even a cheap thumbdrive would probably hold all of the videos I tend to listen to on a repeating basis. Things I burn to DVD's don't get used very often. Things I use often are more likely to hang out on USB drives, since they're more portable than hard drives or DVD's, really. Reduced bandwidth would equate to fewer pieces of infrastructure being used, replaced over time.

At any rate, I don't know the answer to your title question, but I think it's up in the air. It could go either way.

[OKIsItJustMe]

34. Remember, you were decrying YouTube requiring users to redownload a video

So, the videos we’re talking about here, are the ones you “tend to (watch) on a repeating basis.”

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

35. Ah, I'm not going to admit to

using third party software to circumvent the terms of service of various websites. Hypothetically, however, people can, if they choose, use such software to avoid redownloading videos. Most people do not, however.

[OKIsItJustMe]

37. My point still stands

We’re talking about videos which you view repeatedly…

The alternative to the present model would mean that all videos would be downloaded to the local device, and stored until the user deleted them. (Which, based on my unscientific study of user behavior would result in all storage devices being filled to the point of system malfunction.)

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

38. I might be atypical in my viewing habits.

But I suggest the alternative might be more like the old 'usenet' model. Not all videos would be downloaded to all users. A distributed set of servers would mirror the data, users would download from the closest one to them only those they think might be interesting. (And really, that's not much different from distributed server farms that exist now, just not as ad hoc on who decides to mirror.)

I don't download all files when I visit a site I think might have things I'm interested in, only files I think I might want to re-use. So I still wouldn't be downloading ALL videos, unless I chose to be a mirror site.