A Website Powered by the Sun

solar

The world wide web consumes a lot of energy to keep running as it is. The energy sources we use to power the net can make a big difference in the baron footprint of the entire web, which has led one website owner to see if they could run their website using only the sun. It turns out that a relatively small solar setup can do the job.

One catch is that the website had to do without some dynamic elements like a constantly updated database or calls to ad services and other trackers. Reducing your carbon footprint is yet another reason to use ad blockers AKA tracker blockers.

That said, both the network infrastructure and the end-use devices could be re-imagined along the lines of the solar powered website – downscaled and powered by renewable energy sources with limited energy storage. Parts of the network infrastructure could go off-line if the local weather is bad, and your e-mail may be temporarily stored in a rainstorm 3.000 km away. This type of network infrastructure actually exists in some countries, and those networks partly inspired this solar powered website. The end-use devices could have low energy use and long life expectancy.

Because the total energy use of the internet is usually measured to be roughly equally distributed over servers, network, and end-use devices (all including the manufacturing of the devices), we can make a rough estimate of the total energy use of this website throughout a re-imagined internet. For our original set-up with 95.2% uptime, this would be 87.6 kWh of primary energy, which corresponds to 9 litres of oil and 27 kg of CO2. The improvements we outlined earlier could bring these numbers further down, because in this calculation the whole internet is powered by oversized solar PV systems on balconies.

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