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The energy and emergy of the internet

Published: 14 November 2011 Publication History
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  • 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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      Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 460 submissions, 24%

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      • (2023)Hardware-in-the-Loop Implementation of ROMAtrix, a Smart Transformer for Future Power GridsMachines10.3390/machines1102030811:2(308)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2023
      • (2023)Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize CarbonProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575710(400-412)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
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