Originally Posted by Noir

I saw a stat not to long ago showing that the Internet is using about 5% of the worlds current energy output.

Well, that would be a funny statistics. The Internet per se doesn't use any energy at all ... only the servers do that the Internet resides on, and the notebooks that the users access the Internet from, and the routers that transfer the information from the servers to the clients.

Thus, it makes much more sense to discuss, how much energy is being used by the computer hardware, and here we face another difficulty. A lot of the energy used by computers is not in the form of electricity to run programs, but rather in the form of air conditioners to remove the heat generated by the servers. Actually, the cooling of the servers uses more energy than the servers themselves.

The next question then is, whether it is really necessary to cool the servers down to 20 degrees Centigrade, which is the temperature at which most servers are being operated. A lot of energy could be saved by allowing the servers to run at 30 degrees Centigrade ... and probably, there would be no negative side effects from doing so.