{"id":13544,"date":"2021-06-12T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-12T06:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=13544"},"modified":"2021-06-12T10:42:18","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T10:42:18","slug":"a-sustainable-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2021\/06\/a-sustainable-web\/","title":{"rendered":"A sustainable web"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Around 4.6 billion people use the internet\u00a0every day<\/a>. In fact, 350,000 tweets have been sent in the\u00a0past minute<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

We tend to think of the internet as something ephemeral \u2013 partly thanks to terms like\u00a0\u201cweb\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0\u201ccloud\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 but the servers that host all that data produce\u00a0huge amounts<\/a>\u00a0of emissions, leaving giant carbon footprints behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, there are around\u00a030 billion<\/a>\u00a0internet-connected devices in the world. This includes personal computers, smartphones, TVs, and tablets, as well as myriad devices using the internet in subtler ways \u2013 like smart vehicles, smart home systems and smart watches \u2013 termed the\u00a0Internet of Things<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such internet-connected technologies are already playing a key role in the transition to a cleaner energy future; for example, home\u00a0smart meters<\/a>\u00a0being rolled out across many countries help monitor and therefore reduce household energy usage. But as we rely on the internet to process, use and store ever more data, the power it uses is increasing. For the sake of our planet, we need to make the web more sustainable.<\/p>\n

Energy-sucking servers<\/h2>\n

Research<\/a>\u00a0estimates that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20% of all electricity produced and emit up to 5.5% of the world\u2019s carbon emissions. That\u2019s more than most countries\u2019 total emissions bar China, India and the US.<\/p>\n

A growing proportion of IT energy consumption comes from data centres. These are buildings used to store data and computer hardware, which almost always plug directly into the local\u00a0electricity grid<\/a>. In most countries, that means they mostly use non-renewable sources of electricity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Around 50% of data centres are now\u00a0\u201chyperscale\u201d<\/a>, meaning they contain more than\u00a05,000 servers<\/a>\u00a0and are generally larger than 1,000m\u00b2. These are typically used by major players in the data industry such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS) \u2013 which alone hosts\u00a05.8%<\/a>\u00a0of all sites on the internet.<\/p>\n

A number of these data centres have been trying to reduce their environmental impact and, in the process, to secure lower energy bills. Google have announced their goal to achieve 24\/7 renewable energy-powered\u00a0data centres<\/a>\u00a0by 2030, and their first such data centre became\u00a0operational<\/a>\u00a0last year near Las Vegas. To run such centres solely off renewable energy, locating them in regions with abundant wind, solar, geothermal or hydroelectric power available is vital.<\/p>\n

The past decade has seen another trend emerge: renewable energy-powered web hosting. Increasing numbers of website owners are choosing to pay platforms like\u00a0AWS<\/a>\u00a0for space to store files on giant web servers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an attempt to diminish the environmental impact of all that energy usage, some choose to purchase offsets \u2013 payments that\u00a0theoretically compensate<\/a>\u00a0for carbon emissions by supporting low-carbon energy generation \u2013 whilst others purchase energy from renewable sources to match their total energy consumption.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a growing number of businesses have installed renewable energy systems such as solar panels or wind turbines with battery backups to directly power IT infrastructure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Building a sustainable internet<\/h2>\n

As the internet grows, I\u2019ve been looking into ways to build greater sustainability closer to home. Designing less energy-intensive websites could be an interesting way to start.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each user who logged onto\u00a0The Conversation<\/a>\u00a0today generated around 1.3g of CO\u2082, depending on their location and connection speed. That\u2019s not too bad: although not as good as\u00a0Google<\/a>, whose relatively minimalist homepage only generates around 0.2g per visit, it\u2019s far better than the\u00a0Daily Mail<\/a>\u2019s image-heavy online homepage generating a whopping 54.0g per visit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Considering the latter two websites receive around 5 billion and 300 million visits per day respectively, it\u2019s easy to see how our internet-generated carbon emissions add up. If you\u2019re curious about the footprints of other websites,\u00a0Website Carbon<\/a>\u00a0is a simple resource for estimating the CO\u2082 a website produces.<\/p>\n

Web designers could embrace minimalism, helping to reduce the energy required to load images, video and even specialised fonts that all require extra, sizeable files. Of course, this would make for a much less engaging internet experience.<\/p>\n

Could sun power the web?<\/h2>\n

Another potential solution for surfing more sustainably is offered by initiatives like\u00a0Solar Protocol<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Low Tech Magazine<\/a>. These ingenious websites are entirely powered by\u00a0solar energy<\/a>. Their environmentally friendly, responsive web design strategies \u2013 including reduced-colour images and default typefaces \u2013 allow their websites to run more efficiently based upon real-time assessment of available sunlight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Solar Protocol, for example, runs via a network of\u00a0solar servers<\/a>located across the globe. When a user visits the site, their content is delivered from the server receiving the most solar energy at that time. The resolution of the website is also dynamically altered according to the energy being generated by the solar panel.<\/p>\n

When the solar energy or battery level falls below a specific threshold, due for example to a cloudy day, the websites become low-resolution. They could even revert to a basic, text-only format when the clouds have truly closed in and power is particularly low.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The challenge designers and engineers face is to scale on-site energy generation technologies like these to help run the enormous number of sites on the web. Subtle changes to images or page resolution, made during periods of low wind or solar generation, could have significant effects on energy consumption \u2013 but go unnoticed by users.<\/p>\n

For businesses, the benefits of using tech like this include not only reduced energy costs but\u00a0enhanced business reputation<\/a>, thanks to increased public concern around sustainability.\u00a0Over 40%<\/a>\u00a0of UK businesses already generate some of their electricity on site through solar panels or wind capture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0largest solar farm<\/a>\u00a0in the UK, in Flintshire, Wales, is mostly used for generating power for a nearby paper mill. So the next step of powering commercial websites from locally-owned, renewable-driven servers might not be such a radical step.<\/p>\n

First published by The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Featured image of Dell servers for Wikipedia: Victorgrigas, CC BY-SA 3.0 <httpss:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Research\u00a0estimates that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20% of all electricity produced and emit up to 5.5% of the world\u2019s carbon emissions. That\u2019s more than most countries\u2019 total emissions bar China, India and the US’: the case for an internet powered by renewables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":361,"featured_media":13547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/361"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}