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The energy and emergy of the internet

Published: 14 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Recent years have seen a flurry of energy-efficient networking research. But does decreasing the energy used by the Internet actually save society much energy? To answer this question, we estimate the Internet's energy consumption. We include embodied energy (emergy)---the energy required to construct the Internet---a quantity that has often been ignored in previous work. We find that while in absolute terms the Internet uses significant energy, this quantity is negligible when compared with society's colossal energy use.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HotNets-X: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
    November 2011
    148 pages
    ISBN:9781450310598
    DOI:10.1145/2070562
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 14 November 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. consumption
    2. emergy
    3. energy
    4. sustainability

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    HOTNETS-X
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    HOTNETS-X: Tenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
    November 14 - 15, 2011
    Massachusetts, Cambridge

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    • (2024)A Critical and Empirical Analysis of the Relation between Awareness, Commitment, and Pro-Sustainability Practices amongst Higher Education Institutions2024 International Conference on Trends in Quantum Computing and Emerging Business Technologies10.1109/TQCEBT59414.2024.10545066(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2024
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