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.