> Energy efficiency is a bad substitute for clean energy. We desperately need vast amounts of clean, emission free energy

We need both.

And in the long run, energy efficiency is the thing we need.

In a more distant future, we'll be able to use energy to clean up the damage from using a dirty energy source. When that's possible, when you'll be able to wrap full cleanup costs into EROI, then "clean energy" will only mean "more efficient energy source".

Not really. Once we’re on renewables we can just let market pricing wipe out things that aren’t efficient enough to be worth it.

Efficiency gains affect only tiny slices that are outpaced just by growth. They serve to be nothing more than a distraction for intelligent people to sink their time on and feel helpful when they are not.

Clean energy works and the solutions are simple but difficult to implement because it has to be replicated all over in the face of politics and NIMBYs. Efficiency gains are a waste of time but they are attractive to engineers in various industries because they are intellectually challenging and narrow enough to be easily implemented.

> Once we’re on renewables we can just let market pricing wipe out things that aren’t efficient enough to be worth it.

Only if there is something that can compete on efficiency and price. And transitioning to renewable/sustainable energy becomes easier if consumption is lower.

Some from column A, some from column B.

The important thing is to apply the efficiency counterpart of Amdahl's law and target the efficiency improvements first at elements which make up a large part of consumption.

Turning off mobile chargers? Optimising PNGs? They're not a large part of consumption in the first place, so it makes no difference.

Switching all lightbulbs away from incandescent has made a huge difference.

The less energy we use, the faster we can be on renewables.

The Energy Transitions Commission outlines in a recent report three steps for a net-zero future. They argue the first step should actually be to focus on efficiency and reducing consumption. See https://www.energy-transitions.org/publications/making-missi... for details.

No, no it doesn’t.

> In its new report Making Mission Possible – Delivering a Net-Zero Economy, the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) shows that clean electrification will be the primary route to decarbonisation, complemented by hydrogen, sustainable biomass and fossil fuels combined with carbon capture. It urges governments, investors, corporates and civil society to work together to accelerate the deployment of zero-carbon solutions before 2030 to put mid-century targets within reach.

The first step:

> Speed up the deployment of proven zero-carbon solutions – governments, investors and corporates need to work hand-in- hand to build up massive capacities of zero-carbon power generation to enable the clean electrification of the economy.

The focus is on generation, not reducing consumption.

No, internet infrastructure consumes a vast amount of electrical energy. Some put it at 10% of the global use of electricity. That's a lot just to store, process and transfer bits. Curbing that would definitely make a significant impact.

Sure, it won't solve the bigger issue in one fell swoop. No single action will. Instead, the way to realistically make progress is via the accumulation of small improvements everywhere.

Currently, the entire energy consumption of servers stands about 2% of global electricity consumption, which itself is just one of the major emissions sources that include transportation and shipping, agriculture, residential heating etc. And 10% of that 2% is the insanity of cryptocoin mining, which by definition cannot be optimized since it's a system that ultimately competes on burning electricity: https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...

It could be 10% by 2030, based on projections made by experts in "sustainable ICT", which sounds self serving to me, and likely to ignore the massive energy demands of growing nations in other sectors.

I wish some green party would propose banning of crypto mining, since it wastes lots of electricity and creates no real world value that is useful for anything. Like running a factory making bread is useful, you need to heat the owens. But you really don't need to mine for cryptocurrencies to survive.

> That's a lot just to store, process and transfer bits.

Thats what the infrastructure does not what it is used for.

For example those bits are analytics and algorithms used by logistics companies so they can transport goods more energy efficiently saving a lot more energy than was spent on the computing.

No, that won’t help. Even a 25% gain in all things Internet (which is almost certainly a fantasy) is only 2.5% of global usage in your worst case scenario. That’s outpaced by growth so spending the effort instead on more rapidly rolling out solar/wind and replacing 5% of generation goes much further and can’t be undone by a software update with a new GIF feature that sucks power.

So you'd rather have others contribute 5% than working yourself on getting these other 2.5% that you can do something about?

Btw, given the inherent thermodynamic inefficiencies in active datacenter cooling I'd be surprised if we can't do better than 25%.

The total overhead, including cooling, is only ~10% for Google datacenters [0], and the other cloud providers are likely similar. Efficiency gains of that scale probably need to come from somewhere else.

[0] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency

Yes, the 2.5% number is best case for a complete upheaval of how things work right now. That’s a waste of effort societally speaking when literally 100% of electric generation can be replaced with renewable energy.

That's a big number and we can do both. Many peoples skills here are more suited to improving internet power usage vs helping roll out wind and solar.

That’s great if you are in a position to influence energy production. Many are not, and are looking to contribute in whatever way they can.

Probably the most impactful thing you could do is to create web experiences that adequately substitute for carbon-intensive offline experiences. Teleworking, for example, is much cleaner than commuting long distances by car.

I encourage you to look at the work of Vaclav Smil [1] . There's no such thing as clean energy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4

Fine. Energy with no marginal carbon emissions per unit produced.

In the great scheme of things, sure, that's true. But we need much cleaner energy at current prices.

If you watch from around the 1h22m mark, you will see that he conceeds there is no such thing as "energy conservation", and that what he argues for actually is an increase of at least three times the in price of energy and food. Well, that's a non-starter even if you accept the philosophy, it will lead to revolutions and regime changes, it cannot possibly work.

So we absolutely need to maintain the relative standard of living, while significantly cleaning up energy. A 5x drop of our carbon intensity can lead to a more or less ecologically sustainable world economy where billions can enjoy the western standard of living without fucking up the planet in less the a century.

> it will lead to revolutions and regime changes, it cannot possibly work.

While we're all comfy with cheap energy and produce, IMHO revolutions and regime changes aren't neccesarrily a showstopper. With +2℃ we will have regime changes, lots of refugees, probably revolutions, while hopefully avoiding war.

But the timescales are entirely different. To prevent +2°C a few decades or a century down the road, politicians need to make today moves that are guaranteed to leave them unemployed in the best case and and possibly even guillotined. It's simply not fathomable, whoever proposes a 3x increase in the price of food and energy as a solution for anything has no connection to reality.

Energy is used to transform things. A high energy society is a society that transforms a lot, and hence will quickly reach ecological barriers, no matter how clean the energy is.

Emitting carbon is just that, an (unintended) transformation of having energy. Yet we are trying to curb it, and we could do the same with the rest. It't not necessary that all transformations will leave permanent ecological effects. For example, vast amounts of energy could be used to ferry people from Newark to Tokyo for shopping trips in some electric craft that will leave behind only a slight temperature rise of the atmosphere.

I do agree though that with unlimited energy many people will want multiple vacation mansions each somewhere in the wilderness. We need to handle that like we do with carbon emissions, limit it and tax it to high heavens.

Yes we need clean emission free energy more (at the moment), but not everyone has the skillet to investigate on clean emission free energy. We are with seven billion apes on this planet. More then enough brainpower to focus on stuff simultaneously I guess.

Also software is really very inefficient and a lot of it runs on batteries.

We need to use both.

There isn't much focus on the end to end energy usage (I've only seen a couple of papers over the last 10 years or so).

I have no idea how much energy it takes from the place this page is served to it being rendered in the browser, that information should be available so we can make things more efficient.

Exactly this. We can't focus on reducing costs easy, what we can is focus on obtaining energy easy and clean. Civilisation energy demands will only grow. So focusing on web taking 1% less energy will not be as impactful to all of us as pushing for more green energy.

I think the biggest issue now is not ability to generate energy ( we have passive and active green energy sources ) but Storage.

And It would probably be for the best to find kinetic ways to store and release energy. Ofc I might be wrong and in the end batteries and solid state batteries solutions might be the winner. But I think kinetic storage is kinda low hanging fruit not many companies are looking into.

Also kinetic energy storage usually shouldn't degrade as fast as fluid based batteries.

We might end up with a Jevons paradox. Remember that clean energy is not (usually) carbon-zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Not might, rather certainly. Which is perfectly fine if the resource consumed is in near infinite abundance (nuclear or solar energy).

Energy efficiency drives clean energy more than other combination of factors. To say one is a bad substitute completely ignores economics and basic cause/effect.

No one suggested it as a substitute, which means you had this thought before you read OP's link and are using this as a tirade to seem intelligent. Not _everything_ is mutually exclusive.