What is the real impact of the Internet on the environment?

              

what is internet environment

Of the 7.5 billion people on the planet, more than four billion use the internet daily. In France, there are 52 million. The Internet is both a gigantic amusement park and a real working tool. But there is a catch. To allow the Internet to function, thousands of Data Centers the size of a city, running seven days a week and 24 hours a day, consume electricity and release CO2 in titanic quantities. Energy suppliers and distributors as well as web giants are aware of these issues and are trying to participate in the energy transition. France takes the subject very seriously and individually, it is also possible to add its stone to the building.

Some decisive figures on Internet consumption:

The impact of the internet on society:

"If the Internet were a State, it would be the 6th biggest polluter on the planet", this video published by the digital media Brut at the end of November stating a series of alarming figures about the Internet has gone viral on social networks, with more a million views. So, if we summarize (between the figures of Brut and those that we have looked for ourselves in addition), internet in consumption, represents this:

• 1.4 billion smartphone  were sold in 2017 (IDC sources). This is a key figure since Internet users now connect more often via a smartphone than via a computer .
• Nearly 250 million computers were sold this year . This figure is important because computers allow access to the Internet on a large scale as well, according to worldometers.info sources which rely on studies by international organizations to establish daily and annual real-time statistics.

• 230 million televisions have passed this year. What relationship with the internet? More than half represent Smart TVs . These work thanks to IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), in other words the transmission and reception of TV via an Internet connection .
• In the third quarter of 2018, 36.1 million tablets were purchased worldwide (sources IDC). Tablets are another, lesser, but still important way to connect to the internet.
• More than 200 billion emails are sent every day , knowing that an email the size of 1 MB (the size of a simple email without an attached document) sends 16 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.
• Between four and five billion Google searches are performed every day (sources world ometers).

• Cloud computing, which consists of outsourcing the storage of digital data (originally digital or digitized) via the Internet, represents, according to Microsoft figures, 75% of global data storage . For example, Facebook, which stores all your data online (photos, videos, posts on your profile wall) uses a cloud, as does Instagram and other social or professional networks. All of this data has to be stored somewhere, and that somewhere is thousands of huge Data Centers filled with millions of servers running 24 hours a day, seven days a week .
• Youtube (owned by Google) or Netflix are true electricity ogres . Hundreds of people go to these platforms every day to watch hours of videos online.
• Facebook consumes 100 million kilowatt hours each year .
• An ordinary desktop or laptop computer in operation consumes 65 watt hours , in standby: 35 watt hours .

Data Centers: major consumers of electricity

The Data Centers mentioned above therefore host these millions of servers which allow, among other things, the recording, transmission and calculation of data emitted by the various digital media commonly used today ( smartphone , computer, tablets, smart televisions, Android TV box etc).

In the 1990s, corporate offices typically kept these servers on their premises because they did not require as extensive data processing as they do today. For example, currently, Google alone has 37 Data Centers (900,000 servers) spread over several countries: United States, Ireland, Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Singapore and Taiwan (but not yet in France) .

And these Data Centers, how do they work? Thanks to electricity! Unfortunately, the energy used by Google and many other American companies is still in many cases carbonaceous  , that is to say emitting CO2. Donald Trump also left the Paris agreements last January in order to unleash business growth in the United States. Fabien Viault, EMEA manager of the implementation and renewable energy of data centers  at Google , however specified during a symposium with the French Union of Electricity (UFE) in 2017 that there is a real catch of conscience among the giants of the web:

 

Their Data Centers represent their main source of electricity consumption and is equivalent to 6 terawatt hours in 2016 , which is the equivalent of the activity of the entire SNCF network in one hour as well. Aware of their impact on the environment, the American web giant has turned to renewable energies (and in particular wind power) with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Google has notably been able to maximize the cooling of these Data Centers by 40%"

Internet pollution

The Scandinavian countries obtain the best results in the energy transition: in Norway and Sweden, nearly 80% of the energy produced is renewable and they are self-sufficient for their consumption. France has not yet reached this level of excellence but hosts 180 Data Centers , including those of the French cloud computing company OVH . At European level, it is the third country (behind the United Kingdom and Germany) to have the largest number of Data Centers. Antoine Carbonell, head of the Observatoire de Industrie Electrique, says France shouldn't be blamed too much for the energy transition:

How to reduce your environmental impact

No, the Internet and its Data Centers are not an endless pit of pollution, solutions exist, in addition to renewable energies , to limit its impact on the environment.

At the corporate level in France, technical means have begun to be put in place to use the heat emitted by Data Centers . Indeed, according to the report of the Observatory of the Electrical Industry dating from 2017, the company Qarnot computing has developed an intelligent radiator (in this case, a server which processes data) which uses the heat emitted by microprocessors to heat homes. These heaters are available for personal use therefore. For its part, the French company Stimergy offers the possibility of placing servers in building cellars or basements to heat the water circulating in buildings or municipal swimming pools .

At the individual level, it is also possible to act, to be "a hummingbird that adds a drop of water to put out the fire" (according to Pierre Rhabi's theory of doing one's part):

• If you have digital support at home (computer, tablet, smartphone), consider deleting the promotional emails you receive and sorting your important emails once every three months, for example. This will empty the storage space of your mailbox. Unwanted emails are a tarre, if you are for example on Gmail , you can in the settings, block the recipient or report it in spam , it will be automatically deleted by Google after 30 days.
• You can also limit searches on search engines which require, as you have seen, a huge data management . The good old dictionary or encyclopedia will be happy to be dusted off once in a while.
• When you are not in front of your computer, avoid leaving youtube  or Netflix running in a vacuum, they are very energy-intensive .
• At night, remember to unplug your computer from the power outlet and turn it off because even in standby it consumes electricity.