03 | Sustainability and the Internet (Part 2) 🌱

The Jevons Paradox

I would like to start this blog post by explaining the Jevons Paradox. The Jevons Paradox, named after the 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons, describes a counterintuitive phenomenon where increases in the efficiency of resource utilization lead to an overall increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease. This paradox is often applied to energy use, where improvements in energy efficiency can paradoxically result in higher overall energy consumption. When applied to the context of Internet use and digitalization, the Jevons Paradox can be understood in the following way.

As digital technologies become more efficient, consuming less energy and resources to perform tasks, it might be expected that overall resource consumption would decrease. For example, advancements in data compression, more efficient algorithms, and improved hardware might lead to reduced energy consumption per unit of digital output. However, the paradox suggests that instead of decreasing resource consumption, the efficiency gains might lead to increased adoption and more intensive use of digital technologies. As these technologies become more efficient, their cost per unit of output decreases, making them more attractive and accessible. This, in turn, encourages greater use and expansion of digital services and applications. The result is a overall increase in resource consumption related to digitalization. This includes not only energy consumption but also other resources such as raw materials for manufacturing digital devices, infrastructure for data storage and transmission, and the environmental impact of electronic waste.¹

Internet access, usage and data centers

In 2012, 2.387 billion people had access to the internet, or 34.7% of the world’s population. By 2022, this number had risen to 5.3 billion, equating to 66% of the world’s population.² Internet usage has naturally also increased significantly. Here are some insights into the media usage in the Internet per minute (in April 2022):

The amount of electricity used by data centers, to host this content and provide the services, across the world was 240-340 TWh in 2022, which equates to around 1-1.3% of the total amount of electricity used globally. This amount does not include the energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be approximately 110 TWh in the same year. This accounts for 0.4% of the annual global electricity demand. The combined electricity usage of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta rose to  72 TWh in 2021, over twice the amount used in 2017. Data center energy usage (excluding crypto) is expected to moderately increase in the next few years, though the long-term trends are uncertain.⁴

The good thing is, that the big players, Google, Meta, Amazon etc., try to be more sustainable. Google uses 100 % renewable energy for all operations since 2017 and wants to transit to CO₂-free energy by 2030. Meta is also powering all of its services with renewable energy and Amazon wants to reach 100 % by 2025. Right now, 90 % of the electricity consumed by Amazon is renewable, this includes Amazon Cloud Services, which hosts other big content and service providers like Netflix, Pinterest, Dropbox, Reddit and many more.

Recommendation: Green Hosting Provider

Now think about your own website or about the websites, webapps, or whatsoever you made for a client. Does your host use renewable energy? If you want to find green hosting providers, check out the Green Web Directory by the Green Web Foundation. And if you are currently looking for a hosting provider, I personally can recommend Helloly. They have a good price performance and run their servers on renewable energy. 

1. Frick, Tim (2016): Designing for Sustainability. A Guide to building greener digital products & services. ↩︎
2. Petrosyan, Ani (2022): Number of internet users worldwide from 2005 to 2022. In: Statista.
   URL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-internet-users-worldwide/ ↩︎
3. Jo Dixon, Stacy (2022): Media usage in an internet minute as of April 2022. In: Statista.
   URL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195140/new-user-generated-content-uploaded-by-users-per-minute/ ↩︎
4. Rozite, Vida (2023): Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks.
   URL: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks# ↩︎