If you live in a city or a large town, you probably pass by one or more data centers each day. But they don't advertise themselves with signs saying, "Corporate Data Center Containing Highly Sensitive Personally Identifiable Information," so you might not notice. And you won't see 347 football fields of bike generators surrounding them because they're powered by the coal and nuclear power plants that supply most electricity in the US.
What finally matters is not this or that server or data center, but the overall Internet electricity use. How much bicycle-power would it take to run the Internet? Later we can figure out how to landscape the facility, and decide where to put the snack bars and port-a-potties. The EPA's conservative and dated number for 2006 Internet electricity use within the US alone is 60 billion kwh. Getting that much electricity from the setup described above would require 600 million bike generators. Assuming 6-hour pedaling shifts, that would take 2.4 billion pedalers. Think of the stimulus to the global economy: pedaling jobs for the entire populations of the US (305 million), Canada (33 million), Mexico (110 million), South America (382 million), India (1.5 billion), and Japan (127 million).
Five years later, that number has doubled (at least). It is widely claimed that in 2010 the Internet used 3% of US electricity (3884 billion kwh), which is 117 billion kwh. So, we're now talking about 1.2 billion bike generators and 4.8 billion pedalers.
In 2007, an independent outsider who is not on the dole of the IT industry calculated that US Internet energy use was around 350 billion kwh annually, approximately six times the EPA's 2006 estimate, and three times the conservative 2010 estimate used above. I will use the lower numbers, but actual Internet electricity use may be much higher.
What about worldwide Internet electricity use? Available 2010 estimates--200 billion kwh--are probably conservative, as they were calculated by an analyst who works for the likes of the EPA, the New York Times, and various IT industry corporations. Extrapolation from the number of servers worldwide results in about the same number: the reported 60 million servers would use 210 billion kwh annually. What's that in bicycles?
Using the same assumptions as before, the worldwide Internet could be powered by a mere two billion bike generators, with 8 billion people pedaling. (Current world [over]population is 7 billion.) If you placed that many bicycles end-to-end, they would reach far enough for three round trips to the moon, and then a trip back up. Maybe we should terraform the moon and put the generator system up there?
Who would want to design a bicycle-generator system to power the Internet? Someone who wanted to imagine a human-scale equivalent for how much energy the Internet already sucks up. What about other "renewable" energy sources?
Solar And Wind-Powered Internet
At the biggest, most successful photovoltaic projects in the world, the rule of thumb is that ten acres of panels produce a megawatt of capacity (as would 10,000 bicycle generators). A square mile (640 acres) could provide 64 MW. Each megawatt might yield 1.5 million kwh/year, so the annual kwh from a square mile of good solar would be 96 million.
Generating an annual 117 billion kwh (2010 US Internet use) with solar would require at least 1220 square miles of PV panels, and 78,000 MW. For 200 billion kwh for world Internet use, it would take 2081 square miles (that's Delaware) and 133,200 MW. What about a wind-powered Internet? Experience in the wind turbine industry (and again in the choicest spots), has shown that it's good to get 20 MW of capacity per square mile. Three million kwh a year from each megawatt of capacity is also optimistic.
Using
wind turbines to get that 117 billion kwh for 2010 US Internet electricity use
would require 1950 square miles. The 200 billion kwh for 2010 world Internet
use would require 3300 square miles. Most wind power sites are less productive
than the sites from which these numbers were derived.
It's not appropriate to compare solar and wind
directly to conventional power plants. Except for maintenance and accidents,
coal and nuke plants operate 24/7, though demand drops at night. In contrast,
solar is always down at night, and wind is variable, exactly what data centers
can't be.
With solar, more than half the electricity would have to be stored for use when little or no power is generated. The huge batteries necessary for storing this much power look like a cross between upturned railroad freight cars and electric substations. They require space, maintenance, and cooling. Every time energy is converted from one form to another (like rotating energy to electrical energy to heat energy, or electricity into batteries and then out again) energy is lost. That slippage increases the initial kwh necessary, but I have not factored that in.
Also omitted in calculations here are the power lines, substations, maintenance roads, other support facilities, and buckets of ammonia water to clean PV panels. Not to mention the fact that most areas don't get nearly as much sun as the prize spots already se- lected for large solar arrays. I'm also not considering the resources needed to manufacture, transport, and maintain the PV panels. Similar considerations apply to wind power.
Solar and wind have different advantages. Fewer acres of solar than wind are required for each MW of capacity (10 versus 32), but for each MW capacity of wind, you get more kwh/year (3 million as compared to 1.5 million). That is because you are never, ever, going to average more than 12 hours daily of solar. However, you might average more than that for wind, depending on location and circumstances.
At the scale necessary to power data centers, solar, wind, and even bicycle power involve considerable habitat loss. Bicycle space to power the 2010 US Internet would be about 4304 square miles (about the size of the Everglades). For the 2010 world Internet, about the combined area of Delaware and Connecticut. When chunks of ecosystem are shoveled into industrialism's mill, Gaia is diminished. Acres sacrificed to solar arrays, wind farms, power line rights of way, or thousands of bicycle generator pads destroy habitat no less than those given over to GMO crops, cooling ponds, interstate highways, and parking lots. I'll leave it to curious readers to do their own math on powering the Internet with switchgrass, corn cobs, or cow patties.
Energy-Intensive, Thy Name Is Internet
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