Going green on your computer screen

Being green in the Information Technology (IT) sector matters a whole lot because the industry has considerable energy needs. It requires a great deal of energy to produce our beloved gadgets and it requires a great deal more to run the vast data centers storing all that information on the Internet. In fact, the IT sector is believed to have the same carbon footprint already as the aviation industry with its fuel emissions.

In 2012, according to Greenpeace, the IT industry’s energy footprint already accounted for 7% of global electricity use. Soon the internet’s energy footprint  is expected to rise further still with the spread of internet access to as many as 4 billion people in 2020. By the year 2030, the IT sector is projected to account for a full 20% of global electricity usage, according to a recent study.

In its report, called “Clicking Clean,” the conservationist group measures the energy footprints of large data center operations by industry heavyweights  like Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Samsung, as well as those of dozens of the most popular websites and apps on the Internet. Each company is evaluated based on how well they do in several areas of their operations, including the extent and efficiency of their renewable energy use and their transparency over such use.

The companies are then graded from A to F. In 2017, Apple finished on top in the IT companies’ score card, earning an A with a clean energy index score of 83%. Facebook and Google also did well, with scores of 67% and 56%. Not so Samsung and Amazon. Samsung received a lowly D with a mere 11% on its clean energy index score and Amazon did only slightly better, getting an undeserved C with 17%. Microsoft and IBM received a B and a C, respectively, with 32% and 29%.

If the IT industry laggards want to catch up, they will need to make a long-term commitment to become 100% renewably powered, Greenpeace says. They should also be more transparent about their IT energy performance and consumption of resources and “develop a strategy for increasing their supply of renewable energy, through a mixture of procurement, investment, and corporate advocacy to both electricity suppliers and government decision makers.”

Individual users too can make a difference. By streaming music and videos endlessly on your television set or laptop, you’ll end up consuming plenty of electricity. Doing so on your mobile phone is more energy-efficient, however, seeing as the device needs less power to operate its smaller screen than a large computer screen.

In addition, streaming videos via a Wi-Fi connection consumes less energy than via 3G or 4G. Make sure yo turn off your router, though, whenever you are not using it because even in idle mode the device continues to consume electricity.