It’s big, expanding and has a carbon footprint to match

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A riddle. It’s invisible but ubiquitous, and growing exponentially. Even as it provides the capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its own carbon footprint is ever larger. It is the fuel of clouds and the stuff that races through fibre optic cables at the speed of light.

It is, of course, the internet, or more specifically, Information and Communication Technology (ICT). At institutions as diverse as Melbourne University, and its counterparts in the University of California (UC) system in San Diego and Irvine, it frames the next generation of virtual meetings, with instantaneous transmission of image and sound, from near or far.

Larry Smarr is 54, and has lived through what amounts to multiple generations of the life of the worldwide web, from conception in the mid-1980s, when he fostered the network of connected computers known as the National Science Foundation Net, to the ultra high-speed present.

As Smarr explained it at the West Coast Leadership Dialogue conference here in Palo Alto, California, the future of the internet can be viewed in two dimensions. The first is to be faster, using fibre-optic lines to transfer large volumes of information almost instantaneously - no longer just as pictures or text on a screen, but ultra high-definition, skin tone-perfect live images, at 10,000 megabytes per second. The second is to be both clean and be cleaner, reversing its current position, as a significant and growing contributor to the carbon dioxide production that the vast majority of scientists believe is the principal cause of global climate change.

In the United States, the power consumed by computer data centres exceeded the demand of the nation’s TV sets three years ago. In Australia, 200 million tonnes of its annual emission of 576 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is caused by electricity, gas and water, with information and communication technology accounting for 20 per cent of those emissions. Globally, this technology produces roughly the same volume of emissions as the aviation industry.

But that is the very least of it. Consider that the amount of raw data in the world - balance sheets, recipes, form guides, the novels that Google is gradually digitising - doubles every four years. Consider, further, that only 2 per cent of that data is digital, an amount that doubles every 16 months. This is the staggering volume of stuff that another speaker at the Stanford University conference, a leading software and hardware executive, explained, must be “processed, stored, moved, visualised and shared”.

The power demand works in two ways, with every watt of electricity used in processing requiring a compensatory half watt in cooling, the result, Smarr explained, of silicon chips that have become smaller, faster and infinitely more complex, but also hotter.

This equation is sending the biggest companies if not off the grid, certainly further afield. Consider Google, with its headquarters a short drive south of here, on Silicon Valley’s El Camino Real.

The search engine monolith owns hundreds of thousands of servers, and is building a massive new data processing centre in suburban Portland to house them. There it will draw on the 85-megawatt line that once serviced a nearby aluminum smelter (now decommissioned) to power the servers, and the waters from the dammed Columbia River, to cool them.

That line will barely cover Google’s needs. An article in Harper’s magazine suggested that within three years, the Portland data centre would need 103 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 82,000 homes.

Another data centre, in Canada, is being built next to a hydro-electricity plant. Smarr said the CSIRO is looking to do the same thing in Australia. It is co-owner with Australian tertiary institutions of a fibre-optic network that can move information at the rate of 1 gigabit per second, or 250 times faster than the standard Sydney broadband connection.

“There’s not a hydro site in the world that hasn’t been visited by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, to see if they can set up a data centre there,” Smarr said. The data centres are the physical manifestation of the internet and ICT. They are also the places where the carbon footprint of the web will grow or shrink, if, instead of electricity, they can be run off alternate sources of energy such as solar, hydro or biofuel. The sense of urgency at the conference about addressing the internet’s carbon footprint and its associated data storage, was real but had less to do with altruism about the planet’s future and much more to do with the financial bottom line.