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The internet is the biggest machine in the world, and even now, in 2021 it still mostly runs on fossil fuels. That’s because electricity grids still mostly run on fossil fuels. As we learn more about the climate crisis, it’s becoming clear that we need for rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes to the systems underpinning our society. This includes the internet.
It’s easy to think about the internet, and it’s constant appetite for electricity, only as a problem contributing to the climate crisis. However, it’s not going away anytime soon, so instead, I think it’s better to explore the role it should play in accelerating our transition away from fossil fuels. In this piece, we’ll cover how we can decarbonise the internet, and how we can use it as a tool to speed our transition towards a more sustainable and humane society.
Understanding How We Power the Internet Now And How It Is Changing
Globally, most of the electricity we use today comes from burning fossil fuels, The internet is no exception.
We dig up fuel, burn it to generate heat, and use this heat to boil water and make steam. This steam turns turbines, which generates the electricity that everything relies on. So, as long as we have fuel, we have control over when we generate electricity.
This control is convenient, but it comes with costs. Burning these fuels is inefficient as most of the energy is wasted as unused heat, but it also puts CO2 into the sky, worsening the climate crisis. On a shorter timeline, the toxins released all along the supply chain kill literally millions of people each year – in some years causing 1 in 5 early deaths around the world.
This is changing though – we are in the middle of a transition from burning concentrated, fossilised fuels like coal, oil and gas for energy, to one where we collect energy instead through renewable sources around us in the natural world.
While there are obvious benefits climate and health wise to this transition, it means the amount we have available is more dependent on the patterns of the natural world around us – night and day, the seasons, the weather, and so on.
Designing Distributed Digital Services for an Internet Transitioning to Renewable Energy
As we move from a wasteful, but conveniently linear dig, burn, use approach, it’s useful to understand how we can take advantage of the changing economics, where we no longer need to pay for fuel once infrastructure is built.
One way we can do this is to apply what we know already about distributed systems to achieve scalability, reliability, and performance, and use it to cope with scenarios where our energy comes from diverse, distributed, and intermittent sources.
Designing for Local Resources: Content Delivery Networks and Distributed Energy
We can see some of these ideas at work when we look at content delivery networks. Netflix is a good example. Instead of relying on one massive data center where all the videos are served to all of its customers, Netflix operates a system of caching servers called OpenConnect, where they serve local copies of the same content to users instead.