Ungreen TV

According to researchers at Lawrence Berkley Labs, 123 billion kilowatt-hours is how much energy it takes per year to keep internet servers running; add to this the recent disclosure by internet backbone carrier Level 3 that 50% of the traffic on its infrastructure is now video (and growing rapidly), and you can immediately calculate the environmental footprint of internet TV - currently around 60 billion kilowatt-hours a year.

That’s 600 billion 100 Watt lightbulbs on for an hour each, or the equivalent of 100 hours of light from the same bulb for everyone on earth.

The major reason for this is that modern servers are highly inefficient and demand a huge amount of cooling. The adoption of solid state computing and liquid cooled computers should therefore be a priority even before talk of universal broadband can properly begin.

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