Memo to Media: The Coal Industry Wants You to Believe the Internet Is an Energy Hog. It Isn’t. - by Joe Romm

Now you’d think that a study designed to prove the Internet economy must be fed ever-growing amounts of coal to keep running — a study that just happens to be “sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity ” (!) — would raise some red flags for journalists. Alas, no.

... Just 60 seconds on Google directs one to countless debunkings of Mills, mostly by Dr. Jon Koomey, who is a research fellow at Stanford and former staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he became the world’s foremost expert authority on the electricity consumption of the Internet.

There’s a regular trend on the electrical efficiency of computers that has persisted for two decades longer than Moore’s law, and applies to all electronic information technology, not just microprocessors.  The electrical efficiency of computation, defined as the number of computations we can do per kilowatt-hour consumed, has doubled roughly every year and a half since the mid 1940s."

Memo to Media:  The Coal Industry Wants You to Believe the Internet Is an Energy Hog.  It Isn’t.