Eat, sleep, click: the bicycle-powered Internet.

AuthorMorris, Jane Anne
PositionLess of What We Don't Need

Save a tree, bank online Subscribe online, reduce your carbon footprint. Listen to music online, watch movies online, read books online. No mess, no fuss. Google Inc. has photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on its headquarters. With all that footprint-lightening, you may soon be down to no ecological footprint at all, right?

Since everyone wants the Internet to have a gentle footprint and not be "evil," we should power it with green electricity. Start with a bicycle generator and a server. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures.

All the stuff on the Internet, or in the "cloud," is kept aloft by computers called servers (plus routers and so on). An average server draws 400 watts/hour, half of that for cooling (fairly typical), and 3500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, (1) because it never shuts down.

A healthy biker can produce a constant 100 watts/hour on a bicycle generator, a generous estimate. Four generator bikes at 100 watts/hour apiece would power a server. Alas, that single server can't accomplish much by itself Various techies have estimated that a single online search activates between 1000 and 20,000 servers, often located all over the world.

Numerous servers are housed together in places called server farms or data centers. To power a modest-sized data center (50,000 servers) by bicycle power would require almost a million pedalers and an area equivalent to 347 football fields. (2) Data centers can be as small as closets at the back of a business, or as large as several football fields and use as much electricity as small cities. They run 24/7/365, and tend to have multiply redundant backup systems, so no one has to wait 10 seconds to learn from a web site if it's raining outside.

What finally matters is not this or that server or data center, but the overall Internet electricity use. How much bicycle power would it take to run the Internet? Later we can figure out how to landscape the facility, and decide where to put the snack bars and port-a-potties.

The EPA's conservative and dated number for 2006 Internet electricity use within the US alone is 60 billion kWh. Getting that much electricity from the setup described above would require 600 million bike generators. Assuming 6-hour pedaling shifts, that would take 2.4 billion pedalers. Think of the stimulus to the global economy: pedaling jobs for the entire populations of the US (305 million), Canada (33 million), Mexico (110 million), South America (382 million), India (1.5 billion), and Japan (127 million).

Five years later, that number has doubled (at least). It is widely claimed that in 2010 the Internet used 3% of US electricity (3884 billion kWh), which is 117 billion kWh. So, we're now talking about 1.2 billion bike generators and 4.8 billion pedalers.

In 2007, an independent outsider who is not on the dole of the IT industry calculated that US Internet energy use was around 350 billion kWh annually, approximately six times the EPA's 2006 estimate, (3) and three times the conservative 2010 estimate used above. I will use the lower numbers, but actual Internet electricity use may be much higher.

What about worldwide Internet electricity use? Available 2010 estimates--200 billion kWh (4)--are probably conservative. What's that in bicycles?

Using the same assumptions as before, that worldwide Internet could be powered by a mere two billion bike generators, with 8 billion people pedaling. (Current world (over)population is 7 billion.) If you placed that many bicycles end-to-end, they would reach far enough for three round trips to the moon, and then a trip back up.

Who would want to design a bicycle-generator system to power the Internet? Someone who wanted to imagine a human-scale equivalent for how much energy the Internet already sucks up. What about other "renewable" energy sources?

Solar and wind-powered Internet

At the biggest, most successful photovoltaic projects in the world, the rule of thumb is that 10 acres of panels produces a megawatt of capacity (as would 10,000 bicycle generators). A square mile (640 acres) could provide 64 MW. Each megawatt might yield 1.5 million kWh/year, so the annual kWh from a square mile of good solar would be 96 million.

Generating an annual 117 billion kWh (2010 US Internet use) with solar would require at least 1220 square miles of PV panels, and 78,000 MW. (5) For the 200 billion kWh number for world Internet use, it would take 2081 square miles (that's Delaware) and 133,200 MW.

What about a...

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