How Much Energy Does the Internet Use?

About half the world has internet access.

That's 3.6 billion people surfing the web.

How much energy is that using?

And what is our online world doing to our planet's climate?

Hey Alexa, how much electricity do you use?

"Hmm I'm not sure" No worries, that's what we're here for.

[OPEN] Hey!

I'm Miriam, and we need to talk about your internet habits.

The internet is pretty great - this wouldn't be a thing without it.

But getting this video and all the other bits of the internet to you uses a lot of energy.

What we call 'the internet' is made up of a lot of things: wires traversing the oceans, satellites and cell-phone towers, massive data centers sending packets of information all over, and devices.

SO MANY DEVICES.

Today, there's more than 30 billion things connected to the internet - that's every cell phone, laptop, and tablet, but also every credit card reader, creepy all-hearing speaker, newfangled fridge with a TV on the front, and more things coming online every day.

Every single one of these devices requires electricity.

Charging a single phone or a laptop doesn't use that much energy, but powering billions of internet-connected devices adds up.

It's hard to estimate exactly how much, because things are changing too fast to even count, but in total, internet-connected devices probably use in the neighborhood of 5% of the world's electricity.

Once you've got your internet portal charged and ready to go, streaming a video or posting a pic on Instagram draws on power from data centers distributed around the world.

After devices, data centers are the internet's next biggest energy hog, using around 1 or 2% of the world's total electricity.

And most of this electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

But when compared to all the other things that produce greenhouse gases, like transportation, which causes almost a quarter of global emissions, the internet is doing alright - in total, it contributes only around 2% of global emissions.

And, compared to the speed with which more people are coming online worldwide, and the rapid growth of connected devices, energy use by the internet has increased pretty slowly, because our hardware, software, and data centers have become more energy efficient.

But the internet does a whole lot more than just use energy.

I mean, it's changed nearly every aspect of life, and being able to communicate with each other so quickly lets us do lots of things that are good for the climate.

Manufacturers and warehouses can coordinate better with stores to avoid unnecessary shipping and reduce waste.

In fact, the internet helps us avoid producing a lot of physical things in the first place, like CDs, DVDs, newspapers, snail mail, and textbooks.

Even when we make these as sustainably as possible, they still create more emissions than their digital counterparts.

And then there's telecommuting [Miriam's face on computer], which cuts down on travel.

And maps on our phones, which reduce how long we spend driving around lost.

The internet can even make itself more efficient; using artificial intelligence, Google figured out how to better cool its data centers, which ended up using 15% less electricity.

So is the overall impact of the internet on the climate good or bad?

Maybe the real answer is it's somewhere in the middle.

Everything we do on the internet uses energy, which, yeah, still mostly comes from burning fossil fuels - but a lot of the things we can do because of the internet are better for the climate than their analog alternatives.

So, don't feel too bad about using the internet, just, try to use it for good.