Imagining a Solar-Powered Internet: Kris De Decker Low–Tech Magazine
https://walkerart.org/magazine/low-tech-magazine-kris-de-decker
The average internet/bandwidth speed in 2007 was approximately 3.5 mbps.
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Internet speeds today are five times faster, leading to increased bandwidth usage, which consequently increases energy consumption.
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So if you innovate and the result is some technology that increases energy use by a factor of 20, then maybe that innovation is not so innovative after all, and that’s a big thing. What we call “innovation” these days usually results in something that uses more energy. There’s nothing wrong with innovation, but you can also innovate without constantly increasing the energy use, and I think that’s where we should be heading to, to take that into account also.
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So that’s a bit of what we’re trying to show. It doesn’t mean that making it use less energy makes it become less attractive. You can do both things at the same time, but it needs a lot of thinking, and, yeah, innovation.
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The only difference is that you innovate with the energy use in mind, and then you can go a very long way. It’s not constrained just to websites, it has to do with many other technologies as well.
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people are confusing energy efficiency with lower energy use or energy savings. These are very different things. Something that’s extremely visible on the internet is that making everything more efficient (like a data center) doesn’t necessarily result in less energy use; it just results in more data traffic.
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first thing that needs to happen is that people need to become aware of the fact that the internet uses energy.
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That’s, I think, one of the greatest challenges of our time: how are we going to find an acceptable way to limit things? Things like the internet?
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Wireless traffic through 3G uses 15 times more energy than WiFi, while 4G consumes 23 times more.
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in some developing countries, internet networks are not always on. They are indeed intermittent, because they work with solar panels. Every internet node has a solar panel, and the data only gets from one node to another if there is sun. Your email might take three days to arrive, depending on the weather. So you can adapt basically anything to an intermittent energy supply.
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It’s not fun to be on the internet anymore, at least not like it used to be, in the sense that these days, you open a website, you get a cookie warning, then you get some privacy thing that you have to click away, then you get the newsletter, then you get the ads in your face
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If you want the solution, just look to the past and you will find it. And indeed, even if the history of web design is much shorter than all the other technologies, again, this grew old in the sense that you just look back 20 years, and you find a solution in the static website. Like with many other things, you can improve it because now we have the static site generators which makes the use of the static websites easier. We just have to go back to the basics of web design and see where we come from, and then it becomes clear pretty quickly that all these things we put on top of it are just not really necessary.
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Also, it saves a lot of costs that would be associated with traffic. I would get in trouble if it were hosted through a company because we easily take 40,000 visitors a day on this little blog here in my living room.
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