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In 1999, the Internet also wasted electricity

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There is nothing new under the sun. When the Internet was born, it was also accused of wasting energy.

In 1999, the Internet Wasted Electricity, Too.

By Moon, Deep Tide Techflow

On Saturday, Moments was hit by a video of a Bitcoin miner shutting down a mining machine, with everyone sharing the same message, marking the end of an era.

At zero o 'clock on June 20th, all virtual currency mining machines such as Bitcoin in Sichuan will be cut off collectively, making Bitcoin computing power desiccated to China a reality.

It may be too early and impersonal to make any judgment, but let time tell. I just suddenly remembered the early days of the Internet. In the early days of personal computers and the Internet, they were seen as a dangerous waste of electricity and pollution. In 1999, Forbes magazine published an article, "Dig More Coal -- The PCS Are Coming," which criticized the rise of the Internet for increasing electricity consumption and mining more coal. Share this article with you today, and have a great weekend.

The original

Somewhere in the United States, a lump of coal burns every time a book is ordered online. According to current fuel economy rating: about 1 pound of coal, which can be used to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is energy-intensive. The Internet may one day save us bricks, mortar and catalogue paper, but it is burning a lot of fossil fuels. Under the hood of personal computers, the demand for "horsepower" doubles every few years. Yes, today's microprocessors are far more powerful than their predecessors at turning electricity into computing, but the overall demand for digital power is growing far faster than efficiency. We are using more chips and bigger chips and processing more digital information.

In general, chips are running hotter, fans are spinning faster, and the power consumption of our disk drives and screens is rising. For the old thermoelectric complex, it is generally believed that it is in a period of decline, the impact is astonishing. Of today's trillion-dollar grid infrastructure, about half serves only two-century-old technologies -- light bulbs and electric motors. Not long ago, that meant little growth prospects for the power sector. We have about as many motors and bulbs as we need. "The long-run supply curve of electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon," declared Amory Lovins, a greenery guru, in 1984.

However, when Lovins was investigating, IBM and other companies were just beginning to roll out large numbers of personal computers. Today, 50 billion integrated circuits and 200 billion microprocessors are produced worldwide each year, and each of these chips runs on electricity. On its surface, bits incarnate as electrons, and the chip operates at an extremely high power density, one-tenth that of the surface of the sun. Lucent, Notel, Cisco, 3Com, Intel, AMD, Compaq and Dell have become the new GE behind the recovery in power demand. Your PC and its peripherals need about 1000 watts of power. According to a study by IntelLiquest, the average Internet user is online for 12 hours a week, and this use translates to about 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity consumption a year. There are already more than 50 million PCs in homes and 150 million more in businesses, with another 36 million sold each year and 20 million sold over the Internet. And for every piece of wired hardware on your desk, there are two or three devices lurking outside the network -- office hubs and servers, routers, Repeaters, amplifiers, remote servers, and so on. The heavy rail that would normally power a Schwab or Amazon would require a megawatt, and there are already more than 17, 000 pure-web companies (eBay, E-Trade, etc.).

Each of the larger companies represents the electrical load of a small village.

Moving dot.com from the Internet to the desktop requires more power. Cisco's 7500 Series router, for example, keeps the network hot by routing at 400 million bits per second, but to do so, it requires 1.5 kilowatts of power. Wireless networks attract more power because they broadcast signals in all directions, rather than traveling down wires or fiber-optic tunnels. Digital PC networks, still in their infancy, are expected to require 70, 000 radio base stations within a few years and twice that within a decade. Each station burns at least a few kilowatts. The wireless handset market (next generation handhelds, etc.) will reach 20 million units a year in a few years.

Taken individually, many of these boxes consume only electricity. Today's handheld devices can run for weeks on a few AAA batteries. Cisco's latest gigabit router, the 12000 series, can handle 16 times the bandwidth of its predecessors while consuming the same amount of power. But the total demand for computing power outweighs any efficiency gains. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, today's most advanced integrated circuits can contain 21 million transistors, run at 400 megahertz and produce 90 watts of power; In a decade or so, it will give way to 1800 megahertz and 175 watts of power.

Even if HP's Toronado and Nokia's Internet-enabled phones end up running on body temperature, they will feed data in and out of the network, driving upstream power demand.

Web traffic does double every three months. Some 17 million households already have two or more personal computers. Communication chips are now being migrated from desktops. Electrolux recently announced its "Internet fridge", an embedded personal computer that replaces graffiti strips and door magnets. GE has an Internet microwave oven. Software company Emware is working with Sybase, 3Com, and Micron to bring vending machines online to improve inventory and management efficiency.

It takes a lot of power just to make all these digital boxes. Billion dollar manufacturing plants are filled with stoves, pumps, dryers and ion beams, all of which are electrically driven. It takes 9 kilowatt-hours to etch circuits into one square inch of silicon, and the power needed to make an entire PC (1,000 kilowatt-hours) is about the same as it would take to run it for a year. The typical wafer plant is already a 10 - to 15-megawatt power monster -- electrically, about the size of a small steel plant. There are at least 300 such plants in the United States, and fabs and their suppliers currently consume nearly 1 percent of the nation's electricity output.

The convergence of information and electricity has had a noticeable impact on overall demand. There are at least 100 million nodes on the Internet that consume hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, adding up to 290 billion kilowatt-hours of demand. That's about 8 percent of total U.S. demand. Add in the power needed to build and operate independent (unnetworked) chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13%. It is now reasonable to predict that half the electricity grid will power the digital-internet economy within the next decade. The Internet has a huge global impact. Intel estimates that 1 billion people worldwide are online. That equates to $1 trillion in computer sales -- and another $1 trillion in investment in the backbone of the power supply, with a billion personal computers on the network representing the equivalent of the entire capacity of electricity demand in the United States today.

But won't all this new digital intelligence reduce energy demand in other ways? Telecommuting and email, for example, reduce consumption in other parts of the economy. Energy demand in the transportation sector is indeed leveling off to some extent. The decline in storage, along with a general adjustment in the economy, is cutting into demand for gasoline, diesel and heating fuel. But the demand for electricity, which is generated mainly from coal (56 per cent), nuclear (20 per cent), hydro (10 per cent) and natural gas (10 per cent), has not diminished. The computers themselves reduce the heating load in the winter, because the electricity that runs the chips is eventually spread out behind them as heat, but these gains are offset by the extra cooling load that the computers bring in the summer.

As a result, despite great improvements in lighting, cooling, and heating efficiency over the years, the total energy consumption per square foot of commercial office buildings has barely decreased. The typical home office is set up in addition to, rather than in place of, the downtown office. Canon's new digital X-ray machine, recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will replace millions of X-rays and tens of thousands of machines, but it could also speed up the deployment of more X-rays in doctors' offices. These new devices also suck up bandwidth, as they send high-resolution pictures across the network in search of a second opinion from a distant expert. Overall, total electricity consumption continues to grow by about 3 percent a year, with more than half of that growth attributed to the rise of the microprocessor.

Another aspect of the grid is also expected to change radically: quality and reliability. Traditional power grids can tolerate 60 cycles of power with a single cycle of outages. For refrigerators, light bulbs and ovens, a hiccup in the current is just an inconvenience.

For computers and routers, this can be a disaster.

That's why companies like Power Converts USA have seen their revenues soar 70-fold in a decade by selling uninterruptible power supplies for everything from desktops to Internet company servers to routers and corporate data centers. There has been a similar boom in the systems and electronics that keep electricity clean. Active Power, based in Austin, Texas, makes a flywheel-based Power storage system that is big enough to isolate and protect entire offices and factories from "dirty" electricity. The 1.4-ton flywheel spins at 7,700 RPM. American Superconductor in Westboro, Massachusetts, uses a two-megawatt superconducting magnet, weighing three-quarters of a ton, to do a similar job. Inevitably, more very heavy atoms will be deployed to keep our bits on their designated turns.

Futurists have promised us an information superhighway instead of trains full of coal, and fiber-optic cables instead of 600kV power lines, but we will get both.