The power-hungry internet
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why our growing use of technology is a threat to the planet. Ed Butler speaks to Ian Bitterlin, a visiting professor at the University of Leeds in the UK and an expert in the data centres that underpin the internet and use vast amounts of energy. Ruiqi Ye, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace in Beijing, explains why data centres are adding to the climate change problem. Halvor Bjerke from Norway's DigiPlex, the Nordic region’s leading data centre supplier, tells us why putting more data centres in colder parts of the world could be part of the solution.
Producer: Josh Thorpe
(Photo: Servers in a data centre in the UK, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. Today, is it time we truly clicked over the true cost of the internet? |
| 0:10.0 | What we can say is for the next five years, China's data centres, electricity consumption, is going to grow similar to Australia's like a whole country. |
| 0:21.0 | Yes, everywhere, we're using more and more data these days. |
| 0:24.7 | Should we be charging for the world's online addiction? |
| 0:27.9 | In the future, you can easily see a situation where, as the power demand of the internet does ramp up, |
| 0:34.4 | that cost will have to be passed on to people. |
| 0:36.9 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. Sweet music, Despacito by Luis Fonse, a music video that back in 2018 was more downloaded |
| 1:00.5 | than any other around the world, some 5 billion views. |
| 1:04.8 | What's going a little less known to most of us these days is the price that we're paying for this hot salsa on our phones and laptops. |
| 1:22.7 | The energy consumed by global data servers in spewing out so many downloads of this one track has so far |
| 1:30.1 | been enough to power 40,000 US homes a year. Just think about that. That's a whole load of heating |
| 1:37.3 | an AC right there in that one song. Kind of puts me off Sousa altogether. |
| 1:42.1 | The most commonly held estimate is that about 2% of the world's production of electricity goes into data centres. |
| 1:52.4 | And in terms of IT as a whole, data centres are usually regarded about as one third of the total. |
| 1:58.5 | So, you know, 6, 7, eight percent of the world's power |
| 2:02.5 | goes to feed IT and the internet and the data centres that feed it. |
| 2:08.2 | That's Ian Bitterlin. He's a visiting professor at the University of Leeds and a data |
| 2:12.1 | centre expert. By his reckoning, our inexhaustible appetite for ever more streaming and connecting to songs like |
| 2:19.1 | the one we just heard means that at current rates, internet use is going to be close to a tenth of |
| 2:24.6 | all energy consumption worldwide by the end of the decade. Wow. The IT industry itself, |
| 2:31.2 | the people who make the hardware, have all made huge steps in performance. |
| 2:36.4 | The problem is, is that the demand for data has consistently outstripped that technology growth. |
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