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back to article IT sector needs to keep getting greener: Alcatel-Lucent study

The IT industry needs to work on efficiency to curb its unrelenting demand for electricity – and even if it does, by 2020 it will be responsible for four per cent of the world's greenhouse gas output, according to an Alcatel-Lucent-funded study. The assessment, conducted by BIO Intelligence Services, suggests that the four per …

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  1. praos

    It's Gt, not gT.

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  2. Magister
    Windows

    Sobering

    No doubt there will be those that question the validity of this assesment. But we've seen a massive growth in use of telecoms and that needs the infrastructure to support the growing demand. People insist on creating videos, photos, music files et al. which they than upload to the cloud for the world (in reality, a couple of friends) to share.

    An increasing amount of this is now in HD, making the files much larger and taking up yet more space; and it's stored on systems spread around the world that run 24 / 365 just in case someone wants to look at it during a drunken midnight session once a year.

    Add to that, the growth in the demand for the services in the developing world and it doesn't seem that unlikely after all.

    (Grumpy Old Fart time again)

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In the UK this is very serious given how we've been living with the stable foundation of nuclear energy for years which will decline very quickly. Good old Labour decided that a few windmills would fix the problem and so we'll be without a decent nuclear power supply for a while.

    We'll end up buying electric from France and paying more.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Hey no worries, the Germans will be doing the same. They're "green" dontcha know ;)

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I am still trying to work out why so many people are taken in by the CO2 con? CO2 is a necessary trace gas in the atmosphere, necessary for plant growth. So necessary that it is produced by volcanoes in quantities that make anything produced by man insignificant.

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  5. Tim Starling

    Quick, someone build 10 times as many power plants, the Internet needs electricity

    Power usage of network gear has been growing exponentially for decades, because it was not a significant proportion of costs, so there was little incentive to optimise for energy usage. Now it has become a significant proportion of costs, so it's time to pick all the low-hanging fruit left after years of having R&D concentrate on other things.

    The ICT industry can't afford to fund a massive expansion in the world's electricity supply. Traffic would not continue to grow if such costs were passed on to end users. This study shows an exponential curve extrapolated until it becomes ridiculous.

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  6. RonWheeler

    4%?

    I call shenanigans.

    The only way the 4 percent make sense is if you count ovens and tumbledryers as IT because they have chips somewhere in them. I suspect the figures are based on the same sort of BS as aircon engineers who come round measuring each workstation as being 400 watts for quotation purposes.

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