Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.

Mmmm, but you're double-counting aren't you? There's an easy check for whether you're double counting - you can tell because if you added all the human power consumption (in your equation) to all the avatar power consumption (etc) you'd get a figure larger than the total power consumption.

Seamus,

Sure, but it doesn't matter in the context of this exercise. For simplicity's sake, I decided that a single watt could be consumed by both a human and an avatar (seeing as the worlds are separate). It's trivial because the energy consumed by humans playing Second Life has no effect on earthly per-capita electricity consumption figures (at least not yet!). Also, if you were to subtract the kilowatt-hours consumed by humans' PCs while playing Second Life from the humans' consumption figures (just applying them to avatars), avatar consumption would increase relative to human consumption.

Nick

Assuming the above correct, I get "running a PC (120 watts) full time is about half the energy use consumed by the average Brazilian"
(1884,000 watt-hours/(365day*24hour) = 215)

Basically, just using a PC is energy-intensive compared to the rest of the world.

Heck, the US lifestyle in general is extremely energy-intensive compared to the rest of the world:

"A typical refrigerator uses between 600 and 900 kilowatt hours per year, although an efficient one will use somewhat less (depending on the size). Refrigerators and freezers typically make up over 20% of total residential electricity consumption. Nearly all households have at least one refrigerator and about 30% own two."

I think the language you use to describe your findings is a little misleading. You say "an avatar" - but the number 10000-15000 is the number of people online at any given time.
What you're saying is "if you operate a PC 24/7/365 you spend more power than the average Brazilian" - which is not really very surprising.

The number of active users in Second Life is currently around 700K. So per avatar, per actual player, the power consumption is about 2.5% that of the average Brazilian - or about 40 kWh per year.

Not that that isn't a lot of power in aggregate, but Second Life is famously inefficient per user. It's not even the users that are causing most of the power drain but upkeep of the environment the users walk around in.

Nick - true, but I'd have thought the important thing to measure (for this exercise) was the marginal power consumption of the avatars. I wasn't very clear when I called that double counting. So (IMHO) the equation should look more like

kWh from SL servers and aircon + (kWh from SL users' PCs and monitors - kWh that SL users' PCs would have consumed anyway if the users hadn't been playing SL)

Since your equation attributes fully one third of avatar power consumption to the users' PCs and monitors...we might assume that if SL didn't exist all the players would be playing something else. Under that assumption the marginal avatar power consumption falls by a third. Assume instead that half of the current SL users would substitute their SL time for something that didn't require a computer (not likely for what is still basically a geek activity) and marginal avatar power consumption falls by a sixth. Etc.

Claus, it takes one person to operate one avatar in Second Life, so "the number 10000-15000 is the number of people online at any given time" also means "the number of avatars online at any given time." The 10k-15k stat represents peak concurrent users--SL broke the 18,000 concurrent user mark yesterday, I believe. Your description of "active users" is based on the stat "Logged In Last 60 Days." One user could have logged in for 10 seconds and contributed to that stat.

It also bears mentioning that most client computers running Second Life are operating at peak power consumption, as the CPU and GPU are pushed quite hard. I don't happen to have any hard data on this, however.

Claus, Tony's right. If you want a fair comparison between humans and avatars, you need to look not at "members" or "active users" but at the actual average population of Second Life.

Seamus, You're looking at a slightly different issue than the one I looked at, but your marginal consumption calculations are also very illuminating. Thanks.

Nick

Not sure about the server stats. 1000 new sims coming online in the land rush, apparently 30% or so increase in "landmass" (Linden quote from somewhere) suggests that 4000 is the number of sims, not servers.

There are 4 sims per server so that would 1/4 the power on the server side. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Are there 16,000 sims in SL?

I do agree that there seems to be a counterintuitive logical sidestep about the per avatar calculation- I have two accounts I log in regularly, they're each half my SL time (well more 4/5, 1/5) so they each use less power than a single account avatar with the same time in world. This is about avatars, not people.

If there were more avatars, the energy cost per avatar on the server end would be lower per "capita". The servers are a huge per capita overhead when logins are restricted to Lindens only, not so much when 15k are online and half the sim has offlined from grey goo :)

Big difference between avatars and Brazillians- Brazillians don't log off and stop using energy, avatars do. Do we add the energy the typist at the chair is burning while peering at the SL client? :) It's not about watts/minute while awake/logged in, its over the whole 24 hours. I don't know how you measure the cost per minute of an entity that might not exist for days at a time (not logging in).

I doubt I got my own maths or assumptions right, I just don't buy this headline.

Ace,

Follow link for source of server stat. It comes from Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale a few days ago (and it's actually "more than 4,000").

Big difference between avatars and Brazillians

Damn straight. Brazilians are real, for one thing, while avatars aren't. Perhaps I should point out that this analysis is theoretical, done for illustrative purposes.

Nick

An entertaining analysis, but the remarkable thing here is how common, entirely unremarkable things in developed countries (e.g. running a PC for many hours a day) use so much energy. Given how much energy our refrigerators use, I'm sure someone could come up with a shocking number for the amount of energy used to keep frozen burritos frozen. This would of course lead to a much less techy headline :)

With all due respect, Anthony, the ever more intensive use of computing and particularly networked computing, for entertainment as well as commerce, raises important new issues beyond the freezing of burritos. And it's not just about another input into the high energy consumption that already marks the developed world. It's about a whole new layer of energy consumption, which is rapidly spreading through the developing world as well. (Think of all those World of Warcraft gold farmers in China, for instance.)

The more that people become aware of the issues, the better the decisions they'll be able to make - and the more likely it becomes that we'll figure out and embrace innovative ways to improve the efficiency of modern computing. Dry discussions of data center kilowatt usage build some awareness, and are important, but to get more people scratching their heads and saying "hmmm, I hadn't thought of that before," you sometimes you need to express things in new and unusual ways. And intriguing headlines don't hurt.

Now, I'm going to turn on my screensaver and go microwave a frozen burrito for lunch.

The calculations all look right as long as we are only talking about electricity consumption, as opposed to overall energy consumption. In Brazil, for example, energy consumption per capita is over 14,000 kWH/year, while electrical consumption is approx. the number you cited. The differences are cars, heating oil, etc. (see http://www.iaea.org/inis/aws/eedrb/data/US-encc.html) for US and other countries data in an easy to use format).

A few other tidbits:

- the amount of energy used for cooling and power distribution is probably underestimated. Many datacenters use an additional 50% to 100% for these functions (yes, those numbers are scary). They don't make a big difference here, but thought I'd point them out.

- in the US, the average electricity/person is up around 14kWH/year.

- in the US the average CO2 emissions as a result of electricity production is a little around 1.35 lbs/kWH. CO2 is the most prevalent green house gas from the production of electricity. Your numbers come out to about 21.9M kWH/year. Producing that energy will cause 14,763 tons of CO2 to be emitted each year.

- again, looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000)

Thanks for writing this up!

Nick -

As Dave Douglas points out above, the ratio of IT equipment power consumption may be low. This turns out to be a very well researched area in fact. APC estimates (in one of their many many white papers on the topic) that in a typical data center, the IT equipment accounts for 44% of power consumption; the remainder goes to cooling (38%), lighting (3%) and the power system itself (15%).

The cooling number makes sense, as the rule-of-thumb for cooling design is that it takes 1 watt of cooling power to cool 1 watt of power consumption. When you buy IT equipment, you are generally signing up for twice its stated electricity consumption.

As far as per-server consumption, a typical mid-range server power supply will be between 500-1,000 watts. This makes sense, as average rack densities are about 1.5kW, about 10-12 servers per rack.

When you put these numbers together in your formula, now you get:

4,000 servers x 750 watts = 3mm watts / .44 for overall power load = 6.8mm watts = 6,800kW per hour

Something interesting about this. Here in Texas, where electricity is expensive I pay about $0.15 kWh (I use a renewable energy company and so pay about 1 cent more per kWh).

At the range of $0.10 - $0.13 / kWh the servers for Second Life are probably costing $700-$850 per hour to operate. Thats $500-$600 thousand per month in power charges!

It is probable that a facility gets a better rate than I do, but this is still a formidable number.

Assuming each server costs approximately $2,500 and lasts for three years, you have another $280k per month in server depreciation. With just servers and power, it may cost between $500k and $1mm per month to operate.

The Linden website shows 690,000 users logged in in the past 60 days. To get back to our original calculation, 6,800 x 24 x 30 = 4,896,000 kWh per month. Divide by 345,000 users = 14 kWh per user per month, just on the Linden side.

Interestingly, this is trivial compared to the numbers on the end-user side. A typical PC with a 200 watt power supply will consume 400 watts / hour (cooling, etc.). If left running = 400 x 24 x 365 = 3,504kWh in a year. $525 for me to run, and disturbingly over my 2,436kWh quota, for just a computer alone!

I have taken to turning stuff off around the house as much as possible.

Very interesting analysis.

John

Your headline represents a misuse of metonymy. You're using "Avatars" in place of "Computer users." Of course that makes the premise of this whole post more suspect.

All computer use has ecological implications, whether playing a game, shopping online, or blogging.

One might argue that most computer use is frivolous and perhaps be correct. But wither Web 2.0, not to mention the blogosphere, if frivolousness gets banned to protect the atmosphere?

How does an investor profit from these trends?

The Web 2.0 community is responsible.
See my small cartoon.

bye,
Oliver

Tony and Nick - I still have to disagree about your use of "one avatar" when you are aggregating 24/7.

Being in Second Life only accrues cost for a user when he's actually online.
What if this was transportation economy? Would you assume of a "person" that he/she spent an entire life on airplanes wasting fuel. That number clearly would say nothing relevant about the sustainability of airflight.

But wither Web 2.0, not to mention the blogosphere

I have to say, Eponymous, you have a way with typos.

So are we gonna end up moving our household computers outside next to the heat pump?

Ace, that 4,000 server stat I quoted was spoken by Philip Linden in a video interview. It's a number that jives with previous quotes, for example, in March, 2006 there were roughly 2,000 servers running SL.

Eponymous, where Second Life concurrent usage is concerned, "avatars" and "computer users" are the same thing. It takes a computer user to operate an avatar. The "Logged In Last 60 Days" statistic doesn't necessarily indicate a 1:1 avatar to human ratio. Many users operate more than one avatar in a 60-day period--just not more than one avatar simultaneously on a single machine.

Claus, a user can accrue cost without actually logging in to Second Life. For example, ownership of virtual land exacts a monthly fee whether or not the owner of the land actually logs in to use the land. Perhaps I am not understanding what you mean.

Claus,

Your point about how Linden Lab derives revenue from users is pertinent to a discussion of the economics of running Second Life as a business, but my post was looking only at the question of electricity consumption and in particular comparing the electricity required by an avatar with the electricity required by a human being.

I think you're getting hung up on the fact that one user doesn't play Second Life continuously 24/7. But we can do the same comparison on the basis of an hour rather than a day or a year, which would reflect the experience of an actual user rather than a theoretical "living" avatar. Dividing the daily consumption by 24 gives us the hourly consumption:

avatar: 0.2 kWh

Brazilian: 0.2 kWh

So your avatar consumes as much electricity per hour as the average Brazilian consumes per hour. Which brings us back to where we started: "Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians."

Nick

How does an investor profit from these trends?

Invest in hosting companies and content delivery services and pray that VCs keep pumping money into Web 2.0 startups.

So, let's take some guess work out of these numbers. As measured by a multimeter across the leads, our power per server at 100% CPU load on both dual-core CPUs is 175 W. One server simulates 4 regions, so when we talk about 4000 regions, those are simulated by 1000 servers. So, using Nick's math, we get: (1,000 x 225 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 41,400 kWh. 41,400 kWh/12,5000 = 3.3 kWh per person => 1208 kWh per person per year, which is more in line with developing nations. As others have pointed out, since this number is dominated by the residents' PC usage, it might be more appropriate to post that using a PC consumes as much power as the average citizen of a developing nation. I think it is a little unfair to burden us with the home user's computer, since most of those computers are on anyway, but that's a separate discussion. The part that you are absolutely correct to focus on is that in distributed computing applications, the statistic that matters if MIPS/watt.

Thanks for the inside scoop, Cory. Philip said "4,000 machines" (which I took to mean "4,000 servers") on the iinovate podcast, but it seems he meant to say "1,000 machines" (meaning "servers"). Ok. That dramatically changes things, obviously :)

I've got two notes from earlier this year--one, from Philip's Google Talk appearance is that SL was running on 2,000 sims -- the other (from eTech) is that SL was running on 2,000 CPUs. It seems clear now that it was 2,000 sims not servers.

Andrew [Linden] posted a few comments on my original post about the power consumption as well.

The first question that popped into my mind when I read this was: "How much energy are we wasting because all our software these days is written by Quiche Eaters rather than Real Programmers?"

I.e. how much energy is chewed up by the unnecessary extra memory and unnecessary extra paging to and from disc?

Cory,

Can I assume you work for Linden Lab, as Tony implies? If so, thanks very much for the clarifying data.

Note that, in addition to the podcast Tony mentions, Philip Rosedale said, in a Financial Times interview a couple of days ago: "It's hard to scale the physical infrastructure much faster than 40 or 50 per cent a month. We have more than 4,000 servers now, so to deploy 2,000 servers a month would be difficult and we will have challenges meeting that."

Assuming Cory's numbers are accurate, we need a new point of comparison. The average Bolivian uses about 500 kWh a year. So we can now say, roughly, that "Avatars consume as much electricity as two Bolivians."

Nick

WTF!!?? WHAT THE HELL IS AN AVATAR???

An avatar is a person's on-line alter ego. Your avatar on this blog, for instance, is the name I_PWN_NOOBS. On Second Life, people's avatars take the form of computer-generated figures.

ok thanks.

ps I PWN J00

Nick, I understand that you can divide annualized numbers by 24*365 to arrive at hourly numbers. Don't know why you would assume otherwise.

I am not arguing about the math - but about the relevance of the comparison.

It seems to me you're trying to make a statement about the increasing density of computation in the industrialized world and consequently the increased energy footprint of IT. Clearly it matters for that discussion what the actual density of computation is and for that "per avatar" is irrelevant whereas "per active player" is not.
I just find it less interesting what the power consumption WOULD be if the density was 1 is all I'm trying to say.

The SUV example appended to the end of the post illustrates the case. Driving 2,3000 miles in an SUV is perfectly plausible, maybe even low, for a typical car owner. So it's interesting to know that just commuting to work pollutes as much as doing everything else you do to stay alive in Brazil.
So drivers consume MUCH more energy than Brazilians - and since the point of frozen burritos is to reduce food preparation time, burrito eaters probably do too.

I think the PC energy usage is at the lower end of the scale.

Mine draws 400W at the maximimum and from what i can tell regularly does, high end PC's will use in excess of 800W.

I wonder if theres a WoW carbon neutral charity out there somewhere, my /played * energy usage would be slightly scary I'm guessing

You're welcome. LOL, yes I work for Linden Lab, although Google likely answers that faster than I. No worries on the mistake, there is a lack of precision in the use of "simulator", "region", etc, which often leads to confusion, even among Linden Lab employees. Initially we did run 1 to 1, but as mips/watt improved we have been able to run at higher densities. Right now, we are on dual, dual-core Woodcrest Xeons because they maximize mips/watt. We'll see if AMD recaptures the crown as their die shrink rolls out.

If we really want to think about this, we'd need to roll in the various databases, asset servers, web servers, and other machines that go into keep SL up and running. We have around 1500 physical machines. But we are nowhere near maximizing the capacity of the grid machines, so as we continue to improve scaling issues, we will see at least 2 to 3X the current avatar densities ove the entire grid. But, as already noted, these numbers are dominated by home PCs.

Finally, if you are really going to do this calculation, you should really be comparing it to what you can do in SL, which is a lot more than avatars just running around. Anywhere SL goes you have markets -- to the tune of US$3.5 million a month exchanged for US$ -- as well as education, jobs, etc. Think about China, for example. 1% of China is urbanizing a year, so that's 13 million people a year moving into the equivalent of 2 new New York Cities a year, seeking jobs, education, and opportunties. If you could instead take broadband, power, and computers to the rural areas -- carrying SL and markets with them -- how much power would you save? Or, if doing business collaboration in SL allows you to save 5% of your travel budget, how much energy do you save in giving up 1 flight in 20? The full carbon picture is where the interesting questions are. How do virtual worlds allow you to dodge traditional geographic limitations?

Cory, Interesting points. Thanks. Nick

Cory, where do you suppose the BBC got this information from: "[Second Life] runs on 4,100 computers housed in two server farms - one in San Francisco and the other in Dallas."

How did they come up with 4,100 servers when you are only running 1,500?

I particularly enjoyed this passage, describing Linden Lab's headquarters, from that BBC article: "In a large, airy open plan office generously decked out with pot plants and figurines of characters from various sci-fi movies, around thirty people sat at their computers keeping an eye on their digital world."

Generously decked out with pot plants?

That seems a little risky, even if it spurs creative thinking on the part of the staff.

I believe Gareth is referring to "potted" plants - despite SF's well-earned reputation for counter-culture and underground comix, the work hard, play hard mentality here at the office rarely extends past the use of a good 25-year old bourbon. For those looking for more of a rush during the day, the kitchen at Linden Lab is stocked with M&Ms; and energy drinks.

Tony, as Cory pointed out, our active cpu count is sometimes mistaken for our "server" count. We have a variety of machines in use, some dual core Opertons and some newer dual, dual core Xeons. We run a "region" of 16 acres of land on a single CPU, or 4 such regions on a 1U Woodcrest server. We're adding new racks every week, so the numbers change before they appear in print, but the 1500 number is the "server" count, 4100 is the "cpu" count.

(We do some other multiplexing with "void" simulators that are meant to provide physics and connective tissue to other land, so the math above can't be taken too literally.)

I think this is a fascinating discussion. I computed at ecoiron that an average human beings runs at 100 watts, and based on current energy consumption, has about 100 energy slaves (the equivalent of one human) working for them on a daily basis.
(http://ecoiron.blogspot.com/2006/08/do-my-bidding.html)
Second Life seems to be another, almost literally, energy slave that people employ for fun, profit, etc. The interesting part for me is the hierarchy of energy needs e.g. do you keep your toaster slave or your Second Life slave? Rich countries haven't had to make these decisions yet; poor countries have been making them for decades. As the energy crisis heats up, it will be interesting to see what survives.

Just a quick note... there are very few apps that get my fan going on my macbook. When I run SL it runs non-stop. Also, battery life (when I'm foolish enough to run SL on battery alone) drops to less than 30 minutes. There is significant marginal energy use at my end for running SL that comes from the computing intensive nature of the environment.

Why the focus on Second Life?

It seems to me that Linden Lab's servers are unremarkable; they just happen to be hosting Second Life.

The environmental implication of this discussion seems to be that we should be calculating the energy use of using any given user accessing any given server on the Internet.

... and therefore the question Nick started with becomes a more worrying one: "Is the Internet sustainable ecologically"?

I keep coming back to this topic for some reason...

From what I can gather anecdotally about SL they have virtual regions, or sims, tied to physical hardware. From what they say on their blogs etc. it doesn't seem that they have a virtualization infrastructure in place yet. Give that many regions have absolutely nothing going on while others may have as many as 100 avatars present at a time, the electric cost per av ends up inflated (because of all the idling processors).

A smart virtualization strategy that combines low-load sim virtual machines onto a common physical hardware platform, while isolating the high-load sims to a dedicated physical platform could probably greatly reduce the number of physical machines they would have to deal with. The most difficult technical challenge would be migrating a sim whose traffic is increasing to a more dedicated physical platform in-flight without disrupting the game.. and that might be really hard.

Short of dealing with that technical challenge, they might combine virtual machines for historically low load sims onto a single physical server. They could couple this to a scaling land rent fee since these regions would now be less able to take on high av load.

Given their well-publicized use of S3 already, I wonder if they aren't thinking about how they might use EC2 for something like this once it comes out of beta. Switching to EC2 without changing the 1-to-1 relationship between sims and machines though would probably not be cost effective.

Well, from what I've been reading around the blogs etc this week, the sim servers look after more than just the lanscape and avatars on them- all the uploads, assets etc are scattered around on them in some kind of way nobody outside of LL (and maybe few inside :D ) know about. So these servers are maybe already doing work even when apparently idle, I don't know. Maybe an explanation (if it's not a trade secret) would be handy? Possibly off topic for a discussion purely about power consumption except to say "our servers are rarely idle in any sense because of X and Y".

energy usage is one factor. what about the kind of energy? iceland has clean, geothermal energy; so much that it's cheaper to bring bauxite from australia and process it into aluminum there. what if the energy being used were clean, was no outputting co2?

To start I think it very important for everyone to think of the effects of our choices.

Ok lets start with city design and development. They keep getting bigger without much regard for what that means. There is the concept of arcology which addresses this. Take the automobile out of the city. I do not know how to make the comparison of my car to my computer, but if I include all the factors I bet the car is more costly in terms of resource usage and pollution. So if i can do more business online great. If i make a city where walking is actually feasible even better cause I could use the excercise. But of course I've been wanting to hook up a stationary bike to my computer so I can kill 2 birds with one stone, excerise and electricity. And the production of concrete is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gases along side electricity and automobile.

So there are many sources for our energy needs. And research is continuing into more. The worlds first full-scale fusion reactor is being built in france, due to be up and running around 2016. Hopefully it'll break even. But there are other concepts at least as promising, so perhaps in 25 years we'll have that as a source for electricity. That would take care of alot of our concerns. But we aint there yet, and they are costly.

And even if we didn't have something like Second life or any others, all our businesses use massive computer resources. And as for the internet being sustianable and what would we choose (toaster, mircowave, etc, or computer) the internet is one of the greatest inventions the humans species has created, its potential is much greater than most people consider I suspect. Is it not worth it?

BTW I do not have an account on Second Life, or any other virtual world.

cheers all

I think the issue is bigger than SL. We should be able to choose ecologically responsible internet connections no? Online and in real time too.

I tried out SL. The wow factor for experiencing a controllable avatar was very big but, it can be slow, or crash. One night, after a friend with more SL *age & experience* showed me some of the adult entertainments within SL, I was motivated to check out more of that world. I made the mistake of making a one-line comment to a particularly buff male avatar--"hey stud"--just to see what would happen. He made no reply. Within a minute after parting, my avatar's legs kept collapsing.

I know that's not especially relevant to the environmental discussion of SL happening here (which I've already forwarded to my friend), but I needed to share that. Not to alarm anyone, but apparently, you can 'catch' something in SL.

On a more related note, this site details how energy could be saved if webpages were designed with darker backgrounds. Read about it: http://www.risingphoenixdesign.com/blackback.html

My group uses SL for international meetings so the overhead - much lower than first claimed - is far less than people flying in for a face-to-face meeting.

Ironically, we have a meeting on Sunday about climate change. Details at
http://luzoorbit.blogspot.com/

Please forgive me for being horribly late to the discussion. I just got pointed to this arcticle by someone asking me, how I could "justify evangelizing Second Life, even though this will destroy the climate". So I checked it out.

Summary (and please forgive me): Nice Headline, misleading math.

As Cory pointed out the equation "1 simulator = 1 server machine" is wrong - but thats not your fault; most articles on this topic do not use very precise wording. The equation is "1 simulator = less than 1 CPU". Most servers at the Linden Lab colo sport 2 - 4 CPUs these days.

So now (May 2007), we are probably talking about max 2,000 servers (= boxes).

What is more problematic in this calculattion is the fact that you are using "concurrent users = avatars". Sound plausible, but is misleading.

Currently, the Linden Lab grid is used by some 1,000,000 avatars (regular users). They are not allways online, of course. This does not change the fact, that this is the "population" of Second Life (when counting the population of a country you are taking into account sleeping people, too, don't you?) 1,000,000 avatars are sharing the cost involved with the day to day operations of the Second Life grid.

On the other hand, those servers probably consume more in the area of 500 Watts and a PC running Second Life need at least 250 Watts.

The avarage concurrency these days is around 30,000.

So we have

2,000 servers * 500 Watt * 24 * 365 +
30,000 clients * 250 Watt * 24 * 365

= 74,460,000 kWh per year

So the cost (energy wise) to support one avatar in Second Life for one year is more in the ball park of 75 kWh these days - and not 1750 kWh.

This is still a substantial amount of energy. But nowhere near the energy consumption of a resident of one of the earth's poorest countries.

Actually it is less energy than is needed to drive an avarage US-made automobile 100 miles.

Markus,

As noted above, this is a purely illustrative calculation of the energy required to keep an avatar "alive" for a 24-hour period in order to make a comparison with the energy consumption of a person over a 24-hour period. For that reason, I use the "average population" of Second Life as a proxy for the population of an actual country or region. There are, of course, other ways to calculate SL energy use, and I would encourage you and others to explore them all.

Nick

Thanks for the quick feedback, Nick.

I understand, that this is a rough illustration for illustrative purposes, of course. I still think it is misleading, though. What you basically do, is, you calculate the PEAK power consumption of an avatar (= active SL account) and extrapolate this over a year to get a yearly power consumption -- comparable to those of a resident in a developing nation.

If you would take the PEAK power consumption of a resident of Germany (the country I happen to live in), this is probably while he is driving a car. He will consume some 5o kW then. If you extrapolate that over a year you get around 438,000 kWh. This is correct math but -- thank god -- not the real energy footprint of the average German; as he is not driving around all alone 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The roughly 1,000,000 avatars active now in Second Life - thank god - never are using peak power all at the same time. They all SHARE the energy consumption of the whole Linden Lab data center and a part of their PCs power consumption over the year. And on average they use less than 75kWh per year.

The opener of your article was the question (posed by Tony Walsh), if Second Life is sustainable as a business. If an avatar really would consume 1,750 kWh per year, this might be a problem business-wise - and environmentally, too. At 75 kWh a year, I doubt that the energy consumption will matter much. I would love it if this level were even lower, of course.

I wonder how much energy was used to write, store, present, and ultimately for me (and everyone else) to comment on this post?

In 2009, 32 nanometer CPUs are supposed to be available. 45 nm CPUs that are just going into service now are much more efficient than the previous generations.

Second life needs to switch to carbon free web hosting. Some web server companies are stepping forward with solutions to reduce the energy use of the Internet. Solar Energy Host (http://www.solarenergyhost.com) for example, is hosting websites using 100% solar energy.

Just wanted you to know this article is still going around. I just found it today. And there are some good links in the comments, like info on green hosting and green webdesign. A follow up, more refined article might be a good idea.

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