Subj : followup to Power Consumption rant on osopinion.com
To   : All
From : Scott Little
Date : Thu Oct 05 2000 04:54 pm

I swiped this from RCFOC (digital.com/rcfoc), which counters the research Tom
based his rant on.

-+---Original Message-----
From: Joe Romm [mailto:jromm@getf.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 10:50 AM
To: Harrow, Jeffrey
Subject: Electricity use of Internet

There is no truth to the claim by Mills Huber that IT:

1) uses 13% of U.S. electricity and

2) is causing an acceleration of U.S. electricity demand.

It is a myth based on flawed analysis by them.  The rate of growth of 
electricity demand in this country has SLOWED since the Internet took off.  The 
Internet makes the economy more efficient.

Consider the February 2000 testimony to Congress by the head U.S. Energy 
Information Administration:

"From 1985 to 1995, retail electricity sales grew at a rate of 2.6% per 
year.... Since 1995, the use of the Internet has increased dramatically, yet 
retail electricity sales have grown by 2.1% per year."

Based on data from the first half of the year, EIA projects in their August 
short-term energy outlook that 2000 will see 1.9% growth. 
www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/h1tab.html

I am Dr. Joseph Romm, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the billion-dollar 
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy, 
which does most of the Distributed Energy R&D for the Federal Government. I 
have written widely on energy, including my recent book Cool Companies, and 
articles in the Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Technology Review, and 
Science. My team and I consult with Fortune 500 companies and financial 
services firms seeking to understand and/or invest in advanced energy 
technologies. Clients include Enron, IBM and Johnson & Johnson.

The bottom line from recent data is that the growth of electricity consumption 
has actually DECELERATED since the surge in the Internet. And this has all 
occurred in spite of higher GDP growth since 1995, hotter summers (1998 was the 
hottest summer in four decades in terms of cooling degree days, 1999 was the 
second hottest summer), and less utility demand-side management funding, all of 
which would normally lead to higher growth in electricity demand.

If we consider what I might call the immediate pre-Internet era (93, 94, 95, 
and 96), GDP growth averaged 3.2%, while electricity demand grew 2.9%. The 
Internet era (97, 98, and 99) has seen GDP growth average 4.2%, while 
electricity demand grew only 2.2%.

I realized that the misconception that the Internet is driving an explosion on 
growth in electricity demand has become conventional wisdom, and has been 
repeated in the media and by a number of financial analysts. But all of that 
conventional through wisdom derives from analysis by two people, Mark Mills and 
Peter Huber, that has been shown to be utterly in error.

MILLS ANALYSIS IS WRONG. The Mills analysis was shown to be in error by five 
scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 
(http://enduse.lbl.gov/Projects/infotech.html). The lead author is Dr. Jon 
Koomey, author of dozens of peer-reviewed articles on the energy consumption of 
buildings and office equipment and perhaps the leading authority on the 
subject. Koomey et al showed that Mills consistently overestimated the energy 
used by PCs, routers, dot-com companies, and the like by factors ranging from 5 
to 20-basic data mistakes quite separate from analytical errors he makes

The Internet does not consume 8% of U.S. electricity as Mills claims. The 
Koomey et al. analysis showed that this estimate is too large by a factor of 
eight. Computers, office equipment, and the like do not consume 13% of 
electricity, as Mills claimed; a better number is 2% to 3%. 
http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/KawamotoACEEE.pdf

Not only is the actual fraction of electricity consumed by IT/Telecom at most 
3%.  Only a small part of that is growing as fast as the Internet, since some 
components (such as fax machines) are hardly increasing at all, and some new 
equipment (such as your laptops and flat panel displays) are 3 times as 
efficient as the equipment it replaces. That is one reason why the EIA data 
does not show a recent substantial increase in electricity demand. The second 
reason there hasn't been an increase is that the decline in certain 
energy-intensive industrial segments. Industry is responsible for one-third of 
electricity consumption--ten times that of IT/Telecom-so even a small drop or 
slowing in industrial electricity consumption will more than outweigh growth in 
IT/Telecom.

I wrote the first major study on the hypothesis that the Internet is making the 
economy more efficient in how it uses energy, and is therefore actually 
responsible for the recent slowing in the growth of U.S. electricity 
consumption. www.cool-companies.org/ecom/index.cfm.

Anyway, Mills Huber have been successful at propagating this myth, but it is 
wrong.

Joe Romm


-- Scott Little, 3:712/848@fidonet | slittle@slittle.com

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