The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a 'perfect storm' that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.
'In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption,' said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
It's us or the machines!
1 comment:
The issue is a serious one, but the Guardian headline maks me despair. How has `carbon footprint' become synonymous with energy use? Energy consumption is not (demonstrably) bad because of the carbon dioxide it produces; it's bad because it's costly to service and uses up resources. Calling it a carbon footprint problem implies that if we could just plant enough trees we'd be OK whereas the real problem is all the stuff, trees and other, that we're burning without replacement. But if we could break that dependency, we'd probably have enough power to meet most of the other problems...
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