Power, Pollution and the Internet

Here is an interesting article in the NY Times discussing the immense amount of power consumed by Internet data centers. Google's consume nearly 300 MW and Facebook's about 60 MW. They require an awful lot of coal, natural gas, uranium, and wood chips; i.e., not very green. Only a small percentage comes from wind and solar. A consulting firm determined that only 6-12% of power was actually used by microprocessors to run the machines; the rest was feeding idle circuits on standby for surges or as redundancy in case of failures. I'm guessing the people who claim to boycott non-eco-friendly businesses do not opt themselves out of Internet usage... but think you and I should.

Posted September 2012

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The World Wide Web (Internet) was largely an unknown entity at the time and bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Dial-up modems blazed along at 14.4 kbps while tying up your telephone line, and a lady's voice announced "You've Got Mail" when a new message arrived...

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