
Bevand estimates that energy use might be as low as half of de Vries’ current numbers by January 2019. But others, including Marc Bevand, a cryptocurrency researcher in San Diego, California, say that those numbers are inflated and based on gross assumptions. Including other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum bumps that up to 0.5%. But estimates of how fast their usage is going up are contentious.ĭe Vries estimates that, by now, Bitcoin is gobbling up at least 0.33% of global electricity. By mid-2018, says Alex de Vries, a data consultant for international professional-services company PwC in Amsterdam, Bitcoin miners were probably using about 20 terawatt hours of electricity per year globally - less than 10% that of data centres, and less than 0.1% of total electricity use 6. Virtual coins are ‘minted’ by miners who buy specialized servers to crunch time-intensive computations in a growing blockchain that proves the validity of the new cryptocoins. Since the cryptocurrency Bitcoin was born in 2008, concerns have grown that the energy demand of its production will escalate rapidly.

ICT’s energy use must be “vigilantly managed”, says Eric Masanet, an engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who co-authored an International Energy Agency (IEA) report 2 last year on digitalization and energy - but if we stay on top of it, he says, we should keep future energy demand in check. They are streamlining computing processes, switching to renewables and investigating better ways to cool data centres and to recycle their waste heat. With the spectre of an energy-hungry future looming, scientists in academic labs and engineers at some of the world’s wealthiest companies are exploring ways to keep the industry’s environmental impact in check. “The trend is good right now, but it’s questionable what it’s going to look like in 5–10 years,” says Dale Sartor, who oversees the Center of Expertise for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. But those easy wins could end within a decade. If the computationally intensive cryptocurrency Bitcoin continues to grow, a sharp rise in energy demand could come sooner rather than later (see ‘The Bitcoin bite’).įor now, despite rising demand for data, ICT’s electricity consumption is staying nearly flat, as increased Internet traffic and data loads are countered by increased efficiencies - including shuttering older facilities in favour of ultra-efficient centres such as Prineville’s. But one of the most worrying models predicts that electricity use by ICT could exceed 20% of the global total by the time a child born today reaches her teens, with data centres using more than one-third of that (see ‘Energy forecast’) 1. What could happen in the future is hard to forecast. That puts ICT’s carbon footprint on a par with the aviation industry’s emissions from fuel. Data centres contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions, whereas the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem as a whole - under a sweeping definition that encompasses personal digital devices, mobile-phone networks and televisions - accounts for more than 2% of global emissions. That is more than the national energy consumption of some countries, including Iran, but half of the electricity used for transport worldwide, and just 1% of global electricity demand (see ‘Energy scale’).

The President and the President alone must account for his government's reforms.Already, data centres use an estimated 200 terawatt hours (TWh) each year. = explain account for be the reason or explanation for "The recession accounts for the slow retail business" account for If someone has to account for an action or policy, they are responsible for it, and may be required to explain it to other people or be punished if it fails.

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