Here's a new sales pitch from spam-blocking champion McAfee Inc. — unwanted junk email doesn't only waste massive amounts of time, it wastes massive amounts of electricity as well.
A study by McAfee and consulting firm ICF International reported Wednesday that the 62 trillion spam emails or so sent last year cost the planet 33 terawatt-hours of power. That's 33 billion megawatt hours, enough to power 2.4 million homes every year, and represents a greenhouse gas emission equivalent of 33 million cars, the report says.
About a fifth of a typical business's 50 megawatt-hours of power used each year to manage email can be attributed to spam, the report went on. And here's the sales pitch — spam filtering already saves a whopping 135 terawatt-hours of power each year, and having a spam filter on every in-box could cut that wasted 33 terawatt-hours by 75 percent.
Whether or not any spammers emerge with their own counter-study, McAfee's report does underscore the growing energy appetite of the world's information technology industry and its users.
The power consumed by the world's IT and telecommunications industries accounts for about 2 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a 2007 report from Gartner. That's as much as the world's aviation industry.
That's led to a big push from IT and electronics companies promoting more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly products and services. New groups like the Climate Savers Computing Initiative are calling for improved energy efficiency in the IT sector, and new ways to reduce power used by personal computers are all the rage (see Verdiem's Next Frontier: The Phone, Cisco Jumps Into Energy Management for Computers, Buildings).
Data center operators are also hot to cut power for an industry that already consumes about 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity (see GE Looks to Data Center Efficiency, Sun: Data Center Efficiency for Everyone and Advanced Data Centers Claims Super-Efficiency).
And consumer electronics makers are touting their latest energy-efficient products, sometimes under regulatory duress (see CES Plugs Green Technology, Venture Power in Japan: Green Electronics and California Wants to Cut TV Power by 49% in Four Years).
Of course, there can be controversy when converting IT power usage to greenhouse-gas emission estimates, as happened in January when Google was accused in a Times of London story of causing 7 grams of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere with every search. The real figure is closer to two-tenths of a gram, Google said (see Google CO2 Claim Throws CO2Stats Into Limelight).
