Brynn Marie Evans

Second Life has a non-negligible environmental impact! This article from Treehugger reports that the average Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian! Daily energy requirements for Second Life’s 4000 servers, hosting ~12,500 avatars at any one time, total 60,000 kilowatt-hours, or 4.8kWh per avatar. Annualized, avatars consume 1,752 kWh, which is just slightly less than your average human (at 2,436 kWh). (Although, per capita annualized consumption in developed countries is ~7,700 kWh while it is only ~1,000kWh in developing countries).

So 4000 servers require 60,000 kWh daily? Imagine how many servers Google has — this article suggests at least 100,000 (back in 2004). Still, Google is just one of many large internet corporations. What is the environmental impact of the whole internet?Now, Google has nearly completed a huge installation of 9,212 solar panels on their buildings in Mountain View, CA. They say the installation is capable of generating 1,600 kW per hour, although with the cooler, grayer weather in the Bay Area these past few days, production has only gone up to ~800 kW (during peak hours) or about 5,000 kWh per day (~8% of Second Life’s daily energy needs). The panels can supposedly produce enough electricity for about 30% of Google headquarter’s peak energy needs, which is also enough electricity to power ~1,000 California homes. If we assume that daily max production at 10,000 kWh (double today’s output) would power 30% of Google’s servers, then according to Second Life’s energy requirements Google would have about 2000 local servers. Then 100,000 servers would require 1.5 million kWh or about 1.38 million solar panels. If that’s the case (meaning my math isn’t totally off), then this solar panel installation hardly dents Google’s total server energy needs!

You can track the Google Solar Panel Project here. And feel free to correct my math