How much CO2 does one Google search produce? How much for one EBAY auction or for a SecondLife avatar, or running one blog like http://www.thehotaisle.com? How do our activities on the Internet compare to driving our car? The answers might surprise you……
Fellow blogger Rolf Kersten pulled together some quite surprising numbers:
|
Web service |
CO2 emission |
Same emission as |
| One Google search | 6.8 grams | 56 meters with the Prius or running 170 meters |
| One EBAY auction | 55 grams | 420 meters with the Prius or running 1275 meters |
| A SecondLife avatar, 24hrs „alive“ for one year | 332 kilograms | 2734 kilometers with the Prius or (as a human) just living for one year |
| One blog post on blogs.sun.com | 850 grams | 7.6 kilometers with the Prius or running half a marathon |
The results are based on calculating the total amount of energy required to run each companies server farm (converted to CO2) divided by the total number of transactions.
Comment by thehotaisle on 12 October 2008:
Rolf blogs in German so here is a translation of some of the calculations that get to the equivalent of a 7.6KM car journey for a blog entry:
As an example, this is how I calculated the surpisingly high blog post on blogs.sun.com number:
We are hosting 66183 blogs in 3 years, running on two T2000 (the best servers you can get when it comes to power efficiency).
A pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers draws 2*320Watts. Double that number for cooling and infrastructure, so you need 33628KWh in three years. That's 0.5KWh for every blog! One KWh electral power created in a coal power plant creates 1700 grams of CO2 – so the global warming effect of this blog is comparable to a runner running 21 kilometers (or sitting in front of his computer for one whole day).
Steve
Comment by thehotaisle on 12 October 2008:
Rolf blogs in German so here is a translation of some of the calculations that get to the equivalent of a 7.6KM car journey for a blog entry:
As an example, this is how I calculated the surpisingly high blog post on blogs.sun.com number:
We are hosting 66183 blogs in 3 years, running on two T2000 (the best servers you can get when it comes to power efficiency).
A pair of Sun Fire T2000 servers draws 2*320Watts. Double that number for cooling and infrastructure, so you need 33628KWh in three years. That's 0.5KWh for every blog! One KWh electral power created in a coal power plant creates 1700 grams of CO2 – so the global warming effect of this blog is comparable to a runner running 21 kilometers (or sitting in front of his computer for one whole day).
Steve
Pingback by This blog post uses up about 8km in a Prius : Mobile Industry Review on 13 October 2008:
[...] O’Donnell over at The Hot Aisle calculates that the amount of CO2 required to post a blog on blogs.sun.com (as a worked example) is the [...]
Pingback by This blog post uses up about 8km in a Prius | Mobile News on 14 October 2008:
[...] O’Donnell over at The Hot Aisle calculates that the amount of CO2 required to post a blog on blogs.sun.com (as a worked example) is the [...]
Comment by solar for home on 24 February 2009:
Thats a very good question. if this figures go be right, then we are polluting the environment at a rate we cant sustain.