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aimor

It's a point from the plausible.io website and sales pitch.

https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics

The file size savings is 44.3 kB per visitor, which over 120,000 visits is 5 GB per year.

The Website Carbon Calculator uses a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred, and 475 g CO2 generated per kWh.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

44.3 kB per visit * 120,000 visits per year * 1.8 kWh per GB * 475 g CO2 per kWh = 4.5 kg per year after fixing units.

"These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."

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"a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred"

This seems wildly high, even counting all the hops. For reference, 1.8 kWh is enough to move my car 7 miles and my e-bike over 100 miles.

Someone wants to be paid for that energy dissipated. I don't see how Netflix could be profitable this way.

It's difficult to estimate accurately, but their methods are spelled out on the website.

https://www.websitecarbon.com/how-does-it-work/

"Energy intensity of web data

Energy is used at the data centre, telecoms networks and by the end user’s computer or mobile device. Of course, this varies for every website and every visitor and so we use an average figure. The figures used are for 2017 from the report On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030 by Anders Andrae and Tomas Edler, adjusted to remove manufacturing energy as this is not relevant to this calculator. We then divide the total amount of energy used by the total annual data transfer over the web as reported in the Nature article, How to stop data centres gobbling up the world’s electricity. This gives us a figure of 1.8kWh/GB."

If you view the paper [1], I gave it a quick scan and it seems to be counting the electricity usage of all communications devices on top of data centers.

So in power per GB transferred, it's counting all the power used by people's 60" internet-connected TV displays.

Which is, obviously, absurd to include if you're trying to measure the marginal effect of additional data. More data doesn't increase your screen's power consumption, obviously.

An accurate claim for Plausible would have to be based mainly on marginal increases of power by datacenter and communications networks.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/6/1/117/htm

It's hard to say. Obviously without any data at all none of those screens would be on.

I always find the discussion of marginal increases of energy tricky. If I buy a plane ticket on a half-empty flight, obviously that flight was going to take off anyway, so the marginal increase of my weight plus my luggage is fairly negligible in comparison, so I'm only to "blame" for a fraction of the fuel spent, right? But who else is there to blame except the passengers, without whom there would be (eventually) no flights? So shouldn't we all divide the blame evenly?

If we keep it simple, there are two kinds of marginal increases.

The first type is when marginal increase can lead to a "new unit", like planes you refer to -- or servers used by data centers. If a plane fits 100 people, then (simplifying) 1/100 of the time you'll result in a new plane being used, so it makes sense to divide the plane's total resources by passengers -- not just the fuel you used.

But the second type never results in a "new unit". In this scenario, using more resource-hungry analytics will never push someone to purchase a second cell phone to spread the load. So counting anything but marginal energy increase usage by the CPU directly is disingenuous.

So in the case of analytics software, their data center server/power resources fall into the first type. But the consumer device resources fall into the second type.

So in this case I don't think there's anything tricky at all about it.

What if you are switching from a datacenter that's carbon neutral to one that isn't?

Also as a note, the google analytics js is heavily cached and thus doesn't have to travel as far or at all. Also Google has onramps to their carbon neutral infrastructure everywhere, so theres also that.

> "These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."

If we removed 40k of CDN content per visit then the 1.8 kwh/GB would be 2.8 kwh/GB.

Wait, based on this calculation, transferring 1GB results in ~1KG of CO2? That sounds insane.

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