Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
branch.climateaction.tech
branch.climateaction.tech
I don't believe their numbers. They say that data use over wi-fi consumes 150 watt-hours per gigabyte transferred, or 220 watt-hours per gigabyte when including the energy used in data centers.
Downloading Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, at 250 GB [1], would consume 37.5 to 55 kilowatt hours depending on whether you use the lower or upper figures. That's more energy than you need to fully charge a Nissan Leaf. Watching 8k video on YouTube can transfer up to 22.5 GB per hour [2]. At 220 watt-hours per GB transferred that implies 4,950 watts of power -- comparable to running a large air conditioner or an electric oven. If data transfer really had these huge power demands, you'd see electrical brownouts whenever a hot new streaming series debuts.
When I've investigated reports like this before, the flaw of the methodology is usually something like:
1) Take a well-sourced megabits-per-watt study of networking equipment that somebody published long ago -- say, in 2003.
2) Measure today's data consumption.
3) Multiply the 2022 data consumption number by the 2003 energy intensity number. Get a huge result.
Figuring out what happened in step 1 can be difficult because of indirect citations. A current paper will cite "Davy, 2018" but you look at the Davy references and it's getting numbers from "Smith, 2012" while Smith sources from "Chu, 2008" and Chu finally references the person who measured it: "Graham, 2003."
[1] https://gamerant.com/pc-games-file-size-hd-space-biggest-hug...
[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...
> The EU average energy consumption of data traffic depends on the distribution of mobile networks used for cellular data traffic. The Ericsson mobility report also provides information on the type of smartphone subscription. This data is summarised in Table 3. We make the assumption that the distribution of the total data-use over the different mobile networks is the same.
According to their numbers, 2G would account for nearly two thirds of total mobile energy use, which probably should've made them question their assumptions.
The rest of your comment is spot on but in the spirit of similar accuracy it's worth noting that that 250GB on the drive isn't how much is actually transferred.
That said, while I'm sure energy improvements have happened and those numbers aren't correct I do think there's something to consider in the full equation of sheer number of pieces of equipment between you and the server.
If we assumed 1wh per device per GB, that could sometimes be 10-20wh just for routers on your path. That doesn't include switches at the destination, server energy usage, etc. I have no idea what the number actually is on a per GB basis but just using that sample assumption as a way of illustrating that it could add up quite quickly. I suspect in reality it's nowhere near 1wh per device per GB transferred for routers, as even reasonably efficient consumer routers are 5-15W devices.
Also, any section of the network that's at full throughput all the time, and just evenly divides that throughput amongst users as it gets more load is not going to consume /any/ more power per GB no matter how many requests you throw at it.
If it's at full throughput, you can't throw more load at it (well, smaller packets is more load than larger packets for the same throughput).
If everyone attempted to double their bandwidth usage tomorrow, then yes equipment is going to have to be upgraded. (Although even that could be a case of upgrading equipment that provided N throughput and cost Y watt hours before to newer equipment that provides 2N throughput, and still costs Y watt hours)
Which I have absolutely zero idea what use that ratio even could have, let alone be important enough for an entire spreadsheet. But it certainly is complete garbage for calculating the energy cost of data transfers.
(well, infrastructure kWh/GB calculated that way could be interesting, but still utterly useless for calculating a marginal energy cost)
[1] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Lean-...
In short, they have a vast set of requirements you don't have, each one of which adds complexity.
Dont get me wrong, I definitely agree with your message. However I think we need to be clear that a raspberry pi running some services is not the equivalent of cloud services without 'advertising, tracking etc'
I do wonder how many of those queries may be repetitions upon the first one being blocked but even still.
Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a while if I am busy or overnight. This is a lot better than low power mode; the device just sips power and can probably be on standby for a week versus hopefully a day with all the services on the device phoning home in the background. I flick it on when I have a chance to actually follow up on text or calls, and they come in a few seconds after.
This annoys the absolute hell out of me.
> Sometimes I just throw the device in airplaine mode for a while if I am busy or overnight.
I have made a habit of doing the same when I'm going somewhere remote that doesn't have service, else the phone will thrash the battery to death vainly searching for signal.
I made a Shortcut icon named All Off that fully turns off WiFi, Data, and Bluetooth with one press. Easy to set up in the Shortcuts app.
In an ideal world, web browsers would enforce some reasonable runtime memory cap (let's say 5MB for now) and CPU limit on websites, and users must give permission for the site to break the cap.
Or perhaps a search engine that establishes some reasonable resource caps and de-ranks websites that break the cap.
At the same time, a lot of pages are still broken in Firefox since they introduced tracking protection 2-3 years ago.
So I don't see devs fixing, or users caring enough about this issue to cause a change in devs attitude.
270w - #000000 fullscreen
332w - #FFFFFF fullscreen
270w-228w = 42w #000000 fullscreen power draw
332w-228w = 104w #FFFFFF fullscreen power draw
( 104w - 42w ) / 42w = 2.4761
so ~248% more power usage from the screen for full #FFFFFF.
One thing to note is I have the OLED pixel brightness set to 50/100 and the brightness set to 50/100. 2.2 Gamma, black level: full. The LG C1 has some auto brightness baked into the firmware and it fluctuates, I tried to measure it at full brightness but as you can see today it's at 62w over #000000 compared to before so there is some deviation. However, I think it's safe to say that darker colors do actually save substantial power on OLED displays. Plus the black levels really are just amazing. Black is actually black and not a weird grayish with backlight shining through like TN/IPS LCDs.
edit: formatting.
The images are super tight, too.
Buuut, it loads the "Two girls sitting on couch" image even though it doesn't display it by default.
Microsoft, for example, has how many hundreds of millions of Teams users? If anybody has the knowledge and resources to build an efficient application, it's Microsoft. But instead, to save pennies per user, they build with Electron and waste a huge amount of energy.
The big secret? Electricity costs money, and is taxed.
Basically - why fucking bother with trying to measure and assess these applications when there are already measurements on the root consumption - electric power.
Long story short - it's a pretty useless thing to be focused on - it costs well under $5 to charge a smartphone for a year's worth of usage. There are simply much, MUCH more impactful changes we could be focused on.
This is a waste of time.
A phone with a 5000mAh battery (more than any iPhone) takes about 20 watt hours of power to charge.
Charging it from empty to full each day would use about 7.3 kWh per year.
Electricity costs about 15c per kWh.
The last good data I can find (2019) puts the average right around $0.90/year for US based phone users.
Honestly - not really. Yes, it's large in the abstract sense that it's a very tiny number multiplied by a large number, so it appears large compared to the original tiny number - but in terms of practical impact, it's SO VERY FAR down the list of approaches to reducing climate change.
A year's worth of smartphone usage will generate about ~5 lbs of CO2. Driving a car ~5 miles (at an average of ~21mpg, or 411 grams CO2/mile) will generate the same CO2.
The average commute in the US is 41 miles round trip - so every day, the average commuter burns 8 years worth of smartphone usage in a CO2 budget by driving their car.
This is getting really back of the napkins-esque (since not all people work/commute) but if we just assume that in general the US population is driving - at ~330 million people, times 8... we get 2.63 billion.
Basically - each day, driving in the US is generating close to the same CO2 that all 3 billion of those smartphone users will generate in a YEAR.
Looks like roughly 1/3 of US pop actually commutes, so we'll be generous and say that every 3 days, we blow through the yearly carbon generation for ALL 3 billion of those smartphone users.
It's just a really, really tiny number compared to other initiatives. You're MUCH better off tackling basically anything else. There is SO much better low hanging fruit.
A week long "don't drive" mandate in the US earns the whole world years of smart phone usage.
Go argue against "back to the office" policies instead - you'll do far more good.
Like was the question “do you want to pay to use Kwazy Kupcakes, lose access to Kwazy Kupcakes, or allow Kwazy Kupcakes to show you ads?” or was it just “Should Kwazy Kupcakes be allowed to spy on you?”
Because I have a hunch it would be far fewer than 60% if they understood the consequences of destroying the revenue model of their shitty free to play games they use to numb their brains at every available opportunity.
Honestly, the only way forward to really fight climate change is to decouple carbon from power generation.
Everything else is just wasting time re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
That means we need to be all in on zero emissions power generation (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) as well as conversion of combustion engines to electric (see electric cars).
There, fixed it for you.
A bike requires much less and indeed most people could get by with one so I'd like to see more of this too. But it doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator of population use cases, it doesn't signal wealth, and convenience is king. So I don't think it will come about.
Other than that, good article. Data Transmission should definitely be fueled with low carbon emitting energy sources or avoided if possible. But I'm not sure if 30x 8GB DVDs plus packaging and logistics would be a better way to distribute Call of Duty. Why do all the fun things have a downside? Meh
I personally don't think this is an effective use of resources if our goal is to stop climate change.
I am not even close to trusting your statement. Dial back the hyperbole.