karlsruhe.digital presents "Minimal Carbon Internet" at #digiTALK
The Internet provides free access to knowledge, entertainment and
worldwide communication. But the world pays a price for this. Websites,
streaming services, social media and email need electricity: around one PWh
(petawatt hour) per year. That is 4% of global
electricity consumption, which generates around 432,594,303 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2).
If the internet were a state, it would be the third largest
CO2 consumer in the world. There is still a lack of awareness of the connection between Information
and energy.
Michael Saupvisionary, artist, musician,
filmmaker, professor and programmer, will be presenting on October 20, 2022 at the #digiTALK at TRIANGEL
Open Space the project “ Minimal Carbon Internet“, a cooperation
of the Working group
Culture of the karlsruhe.digital initiative. of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Karlsruhe and the UNESCO City of Media Arts.
In addition to a keynote speech and subsequent discussion, visitors to
can expect a vivid demonstration of the “Minimal Carbon Internet” at the #digiTALKS.
Entertainment, art, information, communication has been shifting to digital since the mid-1990s. The pandemic has further accelerated this development. However, the increase in quantity and quality also increases energy requirements. If generated all the electricity for the internet purely from lignite, the consumption would be equivalent to a lignite pyramid with a side length of 1,422 meters and a height of 905 meters. The corresponds to a distance from the earth to the center of the sun.
“We know that the Internet is our opportunity to promote human development, a valuable intellectual resource. We are burning this coal for a specific purpose,” explains Michael Saup, who has been researching the energy consumption of digital culture since 1999. He makes it clear that the aim is not to demonize Internet consumption. Rather, according to Saup, we need to know very precisely “how to convert the old memory of the forest embedded in the earth into the new memory embedded in flat hard disks, “.
We are burning the world’s fossil memory for the new digital memory. As long as this happens, no new form of terrestrial intelligence can emerge.
– Michael Saup
The media artist’s work refers to this connection between digital information processing and energy. It draws attention to the fact that our online behavior also has real consequences for our offline world. And it shows that there is another way!
Two websites, hardly distinguishable from each other at first glance and yet completely different: artist Michael Saup has developed a version of the website
karlsruhe.digital that reduces its footprint by 95% – from 635 MB to 32 MB – with an almost identical appearance and only slightly limited functionality.
AVATAR or thecarbon footprint of a movie trailer and the Internet
Back in the late noughties, Michael Saup, who works very closely with the ZKM | Karlsruhe and is a UNESCO City of Media Arts artist, illustrated these incredible quantities with the AVATAR project. The brown coal that would be needed to stream the electricity for all the views of the film trailer “Avatar” by James Cameron (2009) on YouTube was stacked in an installation that represents the original from the online video trailer. Saup did real pioneering work at the time in calculating and visualizing the energy consumption of digital tracks. The basis of the media art project, namely the calculation of the amount of energy required to transmit these bytes via the Internet, was based on the research work of Jonathan G. Koomey, the discoverer of Koomey’s Law. In 2009, he and his co-authors investigated the question of how the energy consumption of computing machines has developed in relation to processor performance, making it one of the first scientific studies in this field.
“If the internet were a country,
would be the third largest consumer of electricity in the world,” explains Saup. By visualizing
these incredible quantities, it becomes clear that “we have not yet developed an awareness of the
connection between information and energy. The “Minimal Carbon Internet” offers
technical solutions for this,” says Saup.
80% of the Internet’s electricity consumption is generated by streaming
music and films, but the “Minimal Carbon Internet” project by artist
shows that there are also options for action far removed from the major streaming services and
social networks: the minimal carbon version of karlsruhe.digital
demonstrates this using a concrete example.
The website avoids:
tracking, advertising, third-party traffic, automatic playback of
videos, video backgrounds, outdated browsers as well as fancy scripts and
effects.
The website uses instead:
- The latest image
and video formats, - resized images
, data compression, - no web fonts,
only browser fonts, - Compression of
HTML, Javascript and CSS source texts - a green,
sustainable server infrastructure.
These measures have even more positive side effects, as the website becomes faster. The SEO ranking of also increases. This also significantly improves usage in regions with lower bandwidth and for people who can only afford a low data volume . In addition, the website can no longer be hacked .
Minimal Carbon Internet at #digiTALK
When it comes to digitalization and data, it is also important to look in a different direction. After all, the major changes of our time, digitalization and climate change, are inextricably linked. One thing is clear: we need more socio-ecologically sustainable development in all areas of life. And data and digitalization can also help with this or even be essential.
At the #digiTALK on 20 October in the TRIANGEL Open Space, Dr Heike Brugger, Ulrich Oberhofer, Dr Hilke Lentink and Professor Michael Saup will bring together digitalization and sustainable development in a targeted manner. The focus is on these two issues: On the one hand, the aim is to show and discuss where digitalization can help or is even essential in order to conserve resources and counter the consequences of climate change. On the other hand, we will look for ways in which the digital transformation itself can be made more sustainable. Specific practical examples will be used to illustrate where digital technologies can support and accelerate sustainable development and how methods and technologies can reduce the energy and resource consumption of digital and digitized infrastructures and applications.
Joining Michael Saup on the podium at will be Dr. Heike Brugger, Head of the Energy Policy Business Unit in the Competence Center Energy Policy and Energy Markets at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) , who will give an introductory presentation entitled “Dual transformation: on the way to a digital and sustainable future”. The expert for the design and evaluation of energy and climate policy instruments and measures, particularly in the area of energy efficiency, digitalization and artificial intelligence, as well as for modelling the development of energy consumption in private households (with a focus on electricity consumption), will shed light on both aspects of digitalization as an enabler or problem child of a sustainable future. It shows what course needs to be set in order to realize the dual transformation of digitalization and sustainability.
Ulrich Oberhofer is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in the research group “Data-Driven Analysis of Complex Systems” (DRACOS). The aim of the research group founded by Dr. Benjamin Schäfer is to combine mathematical modeling, data analysis and machine learning to research a sustainable energy system. He will complete the panel with his keynote speech on the topic of “Data-driven analysis of complex (energy) systems for a sustainable future”.
Hilke Lentink works on the EU-funded CityCLIM project in the area of climate change adaptation at the City of Karlsruhe’s environmental protection and occupational safety department. The project aims to develop a cloud-based data platform on which citizens and the city administration can access weather and climate services at . Karlsruhe is a model city in the project and uses these services, particularly with regard to adapting to heat in the city.
With her presentation “Digitalization in climate change adaptation in Karlsruhe – a short presentation of the EU project CityCLIM”, she will give an insight into the project, how it supports climate adaptation in Karlsruhe, how interested citizens can be involved and how digitalization can be used for climate adaptation.
The keynote speeches will be followed by a panel discussion.
The event will be moderated by Uwe Gradwohl, Head of the Knowledge Department at SWR and long-time moderator of #digiTALK. The audience is cordially invited to join in the discussion.
Further information: www.digitalk-karlsruhe.de
Start: 7 pm; admission: 6:30 pm. The event is free of charge, registration is not required.
The #digiTALK event series deals with topics of tomorrow’s digital world and focuses on discussion and exchange. The topics are intended as Karlsruhe’s contribution to current debates in an increasingly digital and networked society. digiTALK is a joint project of the Science Office of the City of Karlsruhe, the karlsruhe.digital initiative, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, the news portal ka-news.de and Karlshochschule International University.
Cover picture: Michael Saup.