What, and who, powers the internet? If the internet were a country, it would be the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the world. A whopping 247 billion emails are sent through the web every day, and growing.
Though it is thought of as a ’green’ method of communication, the virtual universe is just as damaging for the environment as it is heavy in its energy consumption.
Nevertheless, the internet’s huge resource consumption exists at odds with its lack of energy resources. We visit ‘data centres’, the digital warehouses that work day and night as the nerve centres of the next digital economic war. Some big companies like Google or Apple have responded by building new centres that run on renewable energies. But unless others follow in their steps, could the battle to power the Web trigger a third industrial revolution?
