Greening the internet

When most people browse a web site or check out one of their friends on Facebook, the last thing on their mind is likely to be concerns about their carbon footprint, writes Rod Tucker of Melbourne University for the ABC. . But every time we use the internet, be it for downloading emails, searching on Google, or watching YouTube, we consume energy and increase the flow of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Today\u27s internet, including all of its add-on services like Google and Facebook, uses only a few per cent of the world\u27s electricity supply. The carbon footprint of the internet is roughly the same as the global airline industry. However, the internet is growing much faster than the airline industry, and is on track to be the world\u27s largest single greenhouse emitter. To stem the greenhouse footprint of the internet, the GreenTouch global research consortium, an amalgamation of 60 industry organizations and universities, including the University of Melbourne\u27s Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET), Alcatel-Lucent, the University of New South Wales and NICTA, is reinventing the underlying technologies and the structure of the internet in ways that make networks more energy efficient. GreenTouch aims to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of information and communications technology (ICT) networks by a factor of 1000 by the year 2020. Read in full Image: Flickr / Wonderlan