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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point.

2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so.

Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer).

(As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).

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This is the same guy who said that Claude Code was spyware because it makes a few Windows Registry keys [0]. I find it really hard to take him seriously.

[0] https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

Oh, one of those people. Gotcha. Back in the early days of my career (can't remember exactly, possibly 2010?) I tried making screensavers and gave them away on my website, someone followed me directly on twitter then tweeted to everyone that my screensavers were some kind of malware because… I'd named the main class as per the tutorial and somehow this looked scary.

Main class? Tutorial? I feel like you're leaving out important details.

Not really important, but if you're interested, I followed some tutorial on how to make a MacOS screensaver back in the Objective-C days.

  MyMainWindow

or something, IDK, it was 16 years ago and I lost track of the source code since then.

0.04 to 0.1 kWh/GB is insane even for 2018 lol.

I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.

Clearly you're charging an EV to drive a jar of microsd cards with your data back and forth

1.8 to 4.5 kW.

This was my math:

0.1 kWh * 3600s/hr = 360 kJ

360 kJ / 8s (time for 1 GB) = 45 kW

Or, slightly more direct: .1kW*h/GB * .125GB/s * 3600s/h = 45kW

Those are some goofy numbers. Obviously incorrect.

Oops

I'd guess there is some offset power needed for keeping a "line" open. Like, 200 kB/s is not twice the power of 100?

When looking at the power consumption across the whole network path and not just a single link, most of the power draw is probably baseline static power costs of keeping all the routers and switches running. Which means that judging the impact of a download in terms of Watts per MB/s is a pretty bad way of analyzing this.

It would also imply that it costs Google ~7¢ in only energy cost to deliver that file to you (using average EU energy costs), which is clearly non-sensical given the rates hyperscalers charge for network egress.

Additionally, the cited number also conflates wired internet (low power consumption) with mobile internet (higher), even though this model is only being downloaded to Chrome Desktop AFAICT.

You think the energy cost to transfer has dropped by 10 X in eight years? Why?

Seems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.

Long term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it.

EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.

I can see a reduction of maybe 10% over 10 years on a per byte basis. My actual bet is that it's even. For every proposed reduction there's a new load balancing layer, a higher energy wireless standard…

Eight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.

Eight years ago, your ISP was already on light over glass, they just didn't serve it that way to your house.

When I was living in the UK the copper cable was 4.5km long. The reason I know that is because BT denied that there was any copper line installed. So I spoke to the building company who told me they installed the copper cables. Then I wrote a letter to my MP. With his help we got BT to conceed and they hooked us up.

It was bad DSL but bad DSL is better than a 56k modem.

Nowadays DSL lines are anything from a few 100 meters to 1.5 - 2 kilometers. I don't know much about cable TV.

But processing and retranssmission of the data at every network node still takes energy

And plenty of that hardware is more than ten years old.

Agreed. Also, complaining about the climate impact of an AI model download while opening your post with an ai generated image is peak hypocrisy. Did not bother to read the rest.

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