Just listening to BBC World Service's "Science in action".
One of the items was on "bit voin minjng" and the wharehouses full of soecialised computers that are used for this. This gunction alone the person claimed consumed as much electrical power as the vountry of Ireland, about "2.5 GW" or 2.5 million kW.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswmpc
(Also a good piece on a repeat stopping point during the human migration out of Aftrica.)
But, this pales against the 60 - 90 billion kW/hr (various sources) consumed by data centres in the US alone, and they are now more efficent than before. It seems the growth trend is slowing, though how much is due to equioment efficienvies, reduced demand, home archive drives . . .
So, every picture or book or document you have in "The Cloud" costs the environment, even if you never look at it again.
Yeah, a case of mea culpa, if it is only my "Kindle content".
By the end of 2018. crypto mining will likely use up about 0.5% (https://www.tech-pundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud_Begins_With_Coal.pdf?c761ac) of the world's power usage.
The entire Technology sector only takes up 10% of the world's power usage. That means that if you're worried about environmental damage from power usage, you should be more worried about the things that are using up a bigger chunk of the power.
This is just the consumer chunk:
(https://i.imgur.com/EUk7bLM.png)
Every other chunk of energy use is bigger than TV and PC together, and TV is a bigger chunk than consumer power usage than PCs.
(https://i.imgur.com/25CrYMf.png)
Computing efficiency continues to increase, it would be great every other industry increased it's efficiency a tenth as much. But let's keep focusing on computers, because...?
Yeah, I am a bit sceptical about figures like these, unless they all quote a single source they can vary 2:1 over several sites.
So I wonder how the consumption for airconditioning compares? So far I have not found much in the way of up to date figures that I underdtand, 4 years ago one site claimed ac sales were on the increase.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/will-ac-put-a-chill-on-the-global-energy-supply
Come to think of it, what's the consumption when all those phones, tablets, notebooks, laptops, ereaders etc go on charge? :)
(https://i.imgur.com/EPnKEkQ.png)
The amount of energy used for the charging of the phones is in the end-use slice. They use the average life of cell phones.
There are two pages of sources for those charts I showed.