What is the cost of social media?

After listening to today's "Costing the Earth" programme on Radio 4 I felt compelled to discuss the energy costs of doing what I'm doing right now, sharing content on-line.

I'm fully aware that my home computer is one of the highest energy consuming appliances we have in the house. We all make a conscious effort in the household to switch devices off at the plug when not in use; particularly computers, mobile charges and televisions.

But here I am, blogging about finding/supporting methods of reducing energy, whilst actually adding to that very impact.

Ironic? Yes. Contradictory? No, I don't think so. Whilst obviously I am adding to the energy consumption of the planet, I think I can take a relative approach and justify this post.

For one, as mentioned above, I'm aware of the consequences of leaving my computer on at home and endeavour to power down all unnecessary devices when they're not in use. If just one of you reading this post considers doing the same from here on (obviously most of you already do . . .), it might justify this post.

Equally, what I am sharing here is of a relatively low content size. There are no video files or large images included that might require extended processor power or energy to stream.

But the above statements, whilst not irrelevant, are slightly idealistic. At the end of the day, there are inevitably going to be more computers in the future, controlling more and more aspects of our daily lives.

We all need to start to think about energy consumption and our part in that equation on an individual basis. There's no point pointing the finger of blame at your neighbour who drives a BMW X5, if your not going home and turning off your own computer when it's not in use.

With the recent explosion of social media, we are all spending more hours, everyday, trying to stay in touch with our various networks. How much has the demand for energy increased since this trend developed?

It's hard to put a figure on the specific demands of social media (since say the recent growth of Twitter took effect), but some of the examples of energy consumption on the BBC radio programme included:

• Viewing a 400k image file 20 times on a standard internet connection creates approximately 0.023g of CO2 emissions (equivalent of 100w light bulb on for half an hour).
• A popular YouTube video that has been viewed 80 million times has produced 58kg CO2 (equivalent of 120 single economy flights, London-New York)
• Estimated UK energy wastage from not turning off unused computers - 1.5 billion kilowatt hours, costing the UK economy £150 million per annum.

These figures illustrate the size of the energy consumption of computing tasks (with some social media relevance) that we all now take for granted.

The radio programme went on to discuss the current technology trend of reducing the size of processors and computers; think smart phones and net books. This reduction in the size of processors usually has an adverse effect on the level of energy being consumed.

Smaller processors not only consume more energy, but they also produce more heat. Obviously this heat needs to be reduced to avoid over-heating, the only way to do this currently is by using fans to cool the processors. This, you guessed it, requires more energy to be consumed.

All is not lost though, governments and companies are starting to recognise and accept that this as an issue. Plans are being put in place to increase awareness of these issues and slowly legislation and guidelines are being introduced to reduce energy consumption.

The European Union produced a Code of Conduct last year for data centres to use, focusing on using energy more effectively and hopefully taking data centres towards carbon neutral services.

There are a number of "green" plans that are gradually being implemented at data centres that help reduce the amount of energy being consumed. These include increasing agreed temperature levels in data centres (most are heavily cooled, which requires energy), and using cooled air from the outside during winter months.

Climate Savers Computer Initiative, a group Google are involved in focusses on their energy consumption globally. Google already claim that their data centres use half the energy consumed by an average industry data centre and they are working to further introduce energy sourced from renewable solutions.

While we as consumers need to think about our personal energy usage, we can also encourage and alert large corporations like Google that we care about their energy consumption levels. Pressure from consumers on service and product suppliers can be a very effective method of implementing business change.

I'm not going to preach that we should all stop what we are doing, I'm not going to stop using computers (although I might consider how I go about certain aspects); all I ask is that we all start to think about when and what we can turn off.

When you go home tonight, make sure you turn off your work PC, when you get home and go online, make sure you turn off your home PC when you go to bed.

We can all make a difference.


Related reading:

Costing the Earth - BBC Radio 4 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r4wn

Solving the energy crisis now - Blah, Blah!Technology http://www.blahblahtech.com/2009/04/solving-the-energy-crisis-now.html

Energy efficiency in the data centre - ConnectedSocialMedia http://connectedsocialmedia.com/2450/energy-efficiency-in-the-data-center-intel-chip-chat-episode-10/

European Union - Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency (PDF) http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative_data%20centers.htm


Related links:

Ecometrica - Quality ecometric information http://www.ecometrica.co.uk/

Climate Savers Computer Initiative http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers http://www.ashrae.org/

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