Not green enough, which is worrisome given how fast its energy use is growing

At first blush, the Internet appears as green as it gets. Buying and reading an e-book on line obviates the need to drive to the bookstore, or having it shipped, and avoids chopping down trees to make paper to print it on. To the extent that files, documents, drawings, photos and videos can be remotely shared, there is less need to print, mail and perhaps less demand for face-to-face meetings hence reducing the need to travel.

As these examples illustrate, Internet is not only convenient, efficient and transformational, but it must also be incredibly clean and green. Right?

The answer, as any answer to a complex question, is more complicated. What about the energy that goes to run the devices that Internet relies on to do its wonderful and seamless magic from virtually any mobile device anywhere on the globe, and increasingly in the air, 24/7? What about the energy that is used to manufacture all those wonderful mobile devices, the laptops, tablets, iPads, e-book readers and alike – plus the devices’ own electricity consumption?

Google, whose motto is to do no harm, appears genuinely interested to find the answer. Not only does the Internet define its business but how this space evolves and expands offers opportunities for future growth and influence. Google is not only investing in renewable energy and pushing for sustainable business solutions, it is taking steps to clean up its own act as much as is physically feasible and financially viable. The company is a green trailblazer propelling its cohorts, the likes of Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Amazon to do the same.

Thus far, Google has convened three exclusive events inviting the best and the brightest experts to share views and brainstorm on better ways to do business on the Internet. In its first gathering in 2009, the discussion was narrowly focused on energy efficiency of data centers – which are highly inefficient, functionally and operationally. Data centers are a good place to start looking for energy waste and energy saving opportunities. In the US alone, data centers consume an estimated 75 billion kWhrs of electricity – not a trivial amount. Global consumption? Perhaps twice as much?

The topic of discussion was broadened in Google’s second event in 2011 to include the entire data center industry. The latest gathering held on 6 June 2013 went even further, not only by examining the evolution of Internet Communication Technology (ICT) but

• The end-to-end energy impacts of the Internet including energy used by end user devices and/or energy used to connect to the web and access data, communicate and use applications;

• Data centers and cloud applications where users’ data is stored and/or manipulated;

• The myriad of communication networks that enables users to access the Internet and data centers; and

• Mobile and fixed access technologies that allows mobile devices to access high bandwidth networks providing 3G and 4G services as well as local wireless networks such as the ubiquitous Wi-Fi hotspots or simple routers at home or office.

As the reach of the ICT continues to expand, so has Google’s agenda. The company is not only interested in energy use of data centers – its core business – but also the broader impact of ICT in overhauling business practices and models. We are not talking about Google’s business practices, but those of other businesses as they migrate to e-commerce and Internet-based transactions.

In this context, the transformational impacts of the Internet are becoming apparent to even the non-experts. And it is not just a handful of virtual companies such as Amazons that have built a global empire selling virtually anything to anybody anywhere on line, but increasingly the traditional brick-and mortar companies like Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, who are trying to emulate them.

Clearly, we are just beginning to realize how far reaching the impacts of ICT are likely to be. Apple’s iTunes, for example, has transformed how music is bought, sold and listened to, virtually wiping out the traditional music recording and distribution business. Ask any teenager how many CDs they own, and they will look at you as if you have come from Mars. Amazon continues to expand the reach of Internet shopping, adding new products and services, including selling e-books – putting traditional paper-based publishing in jeopardy. Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn and DropBox, among others, have dramatically changed how people socialize, communicate, and share experiences, giving rise to social networks as a powerful new phenomenon.

In the age of ICT, even politics is no longer business-as-usual. The question is no longer that an increasing number of people globally will rely on the Internet for personal, social as well as business transactions, but how do businesses – and governments – respond and reinvent themselves to capitalize on this revolution?

To spice up the event, former US vice president Al Gore was given a prominent spot on the program to state the obvious, not only the unprecedented growth of the ICT but its broader energy and environmental implications. Gore figures that by 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion smart devices connected to the internet globally – many in affluent parts of the world already have multiple smart mobile devices, others will follow. We can argue about the numbers but there is no disagreement that it will be in multiples of billions and they will consume lots of energy to run, to have fun, and increasingly to do business transactions.

These many mobile smart devices would use – your guess is as good as Gore’s – as much as 10% of current US electricity consumption. This number too is highly speculative, as smart mobile devices are continuously getting smaller, more efficient and integrating more powerful features into the same device. An iPhone, as everyone knows, is far more than a mobile phone and more energy goes to manufacture it than is uses to operate before it is displaced by the next version.

One can argue that Gore’s numbers are off the mark, one way or another, but few would disagree with the speed with which ICT is permeating virtually every aspect of life and commerce. Gore did not miss the opportunity at hand to relate the growing energy use of ICT with the urgency to address climate change, his favorite topic.

Eric Schmidt, the Executive Director of Google – his claim to fame is that he provides minimal adult supervision to Google’s co-founders who now run the company – emphasized that the growth of ICT will only accelerate. The issue, therefore, is not if, but how to best manage the sector’s growing energy appetite. More important, Schmidt spoke of the “immeasurable societal value” that ICT was delivering “in ways that we never could have dreamed of.”

The Internet, he said, provides consumers with better information to make superior decisions about what they buy and how they consume products and services. In many developing societies the Internet provides citizens with their only access to education, news, medical services and politics – plus the obvious – connection to the wider world beyond their physical reach. “You think the internet matters?” he asked rhetorically. “It matters a lot.”

Schmidt said the solution to ICT’s growing energy consumption shouldn’t be to use the Internet less, or to limit the global reach of smart mobile devices/services but rather to make every part of the ICT value chain more efficient, to increase its reliance on renewable energy and leverage its potential to help solve the climate crisis. Even if coming across a tad solipsistic, who could disagree with the fundamentals?

Other speakers such as Jon Koomey of Stanford University discussed other aspects of ICT revolution including Internet infrastructure, the implications of energy use in cloud-based computing, mobile networks and software that manages and connects the various components of the network. Topics discussed included the perennial favorite, e-commerce, increasingly redefining banking, retailing and commerce, digitization of content encroaching on traditional news media, publishing, books, music and photography and high-speed communications making it easier, cheaper and more practical in areas such as video conferencing and group-work and the impact of all this on global logistics and transportation.

The topics discussed covered everything from trivial to radical. Among the former, a smart parking app, for example, that can direct a driver to an empty shaded slot on a busy street on a hot day, reducing air conditioning use later in the day. Or an environmental guilt monitor that would track consumers’ frivolous shopping habits. Many airlines already make flyers feel guilty by reporting their carbon footprint when purchasing tickets and allowing the option to offset it. By contrast, many public transportation systems report the rough carbon savings by taking the bus, the metro or train, rather than the more energy-intensive private car.

The main take away from the brainstorming is that ICT revolution is still in its infancy with much more to follow. There was broad agreement that the energy use of wireless access networks dwarfs that of the smart mobile devices and the data centers that support them. By 2015, according to one forecast, more than 90% of the energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions from ICT may be attributable the expanding mobile access networks.

For major stakeholders in this ecosystem, doing no harm will increasingly mean focusing on making their cloud-based systems and data centers far more efficient than they currently are. And the potential for energy efficiency gains, according to the experts, is enormous. Superior cloud-based software, for example, could reduce current data center energy by as much as 85%, according to Mark Monroe, DBL Associates, Kendra Tupper, Rocky Mountain Institute and Josh Whitney, WSP Group.

Some years ago, when Bill Gates was still running Microsoft, he made an observation that the center of the universe was shifting from the PCs to the Internet. At the time, the comment did not make an impression on this newsletter’s editor. Looking back, Gates was not only spot on, but clearly ahead of some of us. Now, of course, everyone recognizes that the Internet is here to stay, and what we have seen thus far – in terms of its impact on global business and commerce, education, energy, politics, medicine, social norms and habits not to mention human interactions and communications – pales in comparison to what is likely to follow. In this context, keeping the Internet green matters a lot.