PW2 Web Blog

Thriv’Ability: Dirty Data – Think Energy Before You Click

Contributed by Rick DeVan on April 24, 2011 at 10:02 am ET

Resource: Cloud computing and Internet use suck energy, emit CO2, says Greenpeace via LATimes.com.

Clicking on all those viral videos, chain emails, celebrity tweets and paparazzi photos online sucks up enough energy to rank the Internet — if it were a country — fifth in the world for electricity use.

That’s more power than Russia uses, according to a new report about cloud-computing from Greenpeace.

Resource: How dirty is your data? A Look at the Energy Choices That Power Cloud Computing via Greenpeace.

The ‘cloud’ is IT’s biggest innovation and disruption. Cloud
computing is converting our work, finances, health and relationships into invisible data, centralised in out-of-the-way storage facilities or data centres. This report seeks to answer an important question about this trend, currently underway across the globe: As cloud technology disrupts our lives in many positive ways, are the companies that are changing everything failing to address their own growing environmental footprint?

Regardless of our energy source — renewable, non-renewable, clean, dirty — think about just how much we are using every time we click, and how many needless clicks we make daily. Now, multiply that number by the 2 billion people who use the Internet, and, well, you get the picture.

Is knowing what Sanjaya is doing these days that important? (He is still singing and making music. There, I saved you a click.)

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