There is no free lunch

Remember that old joke about laptop computers being heavy, and that deleting unnecessary files will make it light as a feather? Haha!

Go ahead and Google that joke, if you want.

Wait, maybe you should think twice before you do it.  Not because of the need to think, which is important.  But, for a completely different reason:

Every Google search comes at a cost to the planet. In processing 3.5 billion searches a day, the world’s most popular website accounts for about 40% of the internet’s carbon footprint.

In the internet-of-things world of today, we forget that the internet is based on real world infrastructure and needs energy--a whole lot of it--to work.

“Almost nobody recalls that the internet is made up of interconnected physical infrastructures which consume natural resources,” [Joana] Moll writes as an introduction to the project. “How can such an evident fact become so blurred in the social imagination?”

In our daily lives, we rarely pause to consider how the good and services that we use are created.  Who makes tshirts? Where is the electricity coming from? It is always a combination of ignorance and apathy.

Despite the notion that the internet is a “cloud,” it actually relies on millions of physical servers in data centers around the world, which are connected with miles of undersea cables, switches, and routers, all requiring a lot of energy to run. Much of that energy comes from power sources that emit carbon dioxide into the air as they burn fossil fuels; one study from 2015 suggests internet activity results in as much CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.

For Google, this infrastructure means about 0.01 kg per search request.

Of course, it is not just Google. The Frightful Five and others have to maintain servers and routers and whatever else all around the world.  Which is one of the reasons they also like places like Oregon where they set up their energy-hogging server farms.

Server farms all across the planet.

Ireland, which with Denmark is becoming a data base for the world’s biggest tech companies, has 350MW connected to data centres but this is expected to triple to over 1,000MW, or the equivalent of a nuclear power station size plant, in the next five years.
...
The data will be stored in vast new one million square feet or larger “hyper-scale” server farms, which companies are now building. The scale of these farms is huge; a single $1bn Apple data centre planned for Athenry in Co Galway, expects to eventually use 300MW of electricity, or over 8% of the national capacity and more than the daily entire usage of Dublin. It will require 144 large diesel generators as back up for when the wind does not blow.

The more connected we become, the more our energy needs, unless something is done dramatically different:

Global computing power demand from internet-connected devices, high resolution video streaming, emails, surveillance cameras and a new generation of smart TVs is increasing 20% a year, consuming roughly 3-5% of the world’s electricity in 2015, says Swedish researcher Anders Andrae.
In an update to a 2016 peer-reviewed study, Andrae found that without dramatic increases in efficiency, the ICT industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. This would be more than any country except the US, China and India.

Don't trust all these?  Go ahead, do a Google search ;)