Wouldn’t you know it, the day after I review Mark Mills’s analyses (in 1999 and 2011) of the digital economy as a key driver of demand growth for coal-fired electric power, I receive an EnergyFactsWeekly in my email box featuring new analysis by Mills on that very topic. It also contains links to two other related commentaries by Mills.

In The Efficiency Wall and the Future of the Internet’s Energy Cost, Mills reports that “the historic gains in computing energy efficiency started slowing down in 2005″ due to the “inherent physics” of existing chip technology. During the same period, however, ”the growth in global traffic on the Internet has continued rising at the same old staggering exponential rate.” The upshot? “This combination arithmetically guarantees a higher growth rate now in the total energy consumed by the Internet.”

Computing efficiency gains are rapidly approaching an “asymptotic wall” much as the power of jet engines and cruise speed of jet aircraft did in 1960.   

Jet engine power (measured in terms of the critical aviation metric, power per unit of weight) rose exponentially for the 20 years after invention, then hit a wall dictated by the inherent physics of the engines and materials. Consequently, the average cruise speed of jet aircraft also hit a wall.

“But,” notes Mills, ”there is a critical difference between aviation and digital traffic: the former rises linearly with population and wealth, while the latter grows exponentially as new applications continue to explode for Big Data.”

New materials and technologies are improving the energy efficiency of computing, but, says Mills, not enough to halt the growth in aggregate demand. He concludes with two predictions and a policy recommendation:

• Digital energy consumption will rise, locked into the physics of supply and economics of demand, and
• Energy costs will be increasingly dominated by factors external to the Internet, especially the cost of electricity. Cheap power will matter even more in the future.

We return to a familiar refrain? Dig more coal.

In Will the Cloud’s Efficiency Cut Energy (and Coal) Use?, Mills reviews Green Cloud Computing, a study by researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. Key finding: Although “concentrated, shared and optimized use of massive computing assets is very efficient,” ”more energy is consumed in the Cloud, than on a PC, when the user accesses the Cloud frequently, or does high ‘intensity’ tasks.”

In Welcome to Earth Where Networks Gobble Power — and Coal, Mills examines whether improvements in the energy efficiency of cell phone networks will reduce overall energy demand and coal consumption. He looks at what has happened in China, where network energy efficiency has improved by 50% since 2005.

“As the above graph illustrates,” writes Mills, ”as the number of users expands, and the amount of traffic on the network expands even faster, energy use grows rapidly even with – or, as I have argued elsewhere in these Commentaries, because of – improving energy efficiency.”

As I sit here typing away, Amazon.Com’s Cloud Player serves up 320 tunes I’ve purchased over the past year and a half. I can play them anywhere, any time, on any computer with Internet access. I don’t have to lug around my laptop or even a flash drive. What’s not to like?

Our greener friends worry about all the power consumed by the data centers that deliver computer services over the Internet. Think of all the emissions!

A year-long New York Times investigation summarized in Saturday’s (Sep. 22) edition (“Pollution, Power, and the Internet“) spotlights the explosive growth of the data storage facilities supporting our PCs, cell phones, and iPods — and the associated surge in energy demand. According to The Times:

• In early 2006, Facebook had 10 million or so users and one main server site. ”Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.”
• “They [Facebook's servers] are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.”
• “To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.”
• “Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.”
• “Jeremy Burton, an expert in data storage, said that when he worked at a computer technology company 10 years ago, the most data-intensive customer he dealt with had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database. (Data storage is measured in bytes. The letter N, for example, takes 1 byte to store. A gigabyte is a billion bytes of information.)”
• “Today, roughly a million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3-D animated movie, said Mr. Burton, now at EMC, a company focused on the management and storage of data.”
• “Just one of the company’s clients, the New York Stock Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years, he added.”

The impact of the Internet — or, more broadly, the proliferation of digital technology and networks — on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions has been a contentious topic since 1999, when technology analyst Mark P. Mills published a study provocatively titled “The Internet Begins with Coal” and co-authored with Peter Huber a Forbes column titled “Dig more coal: The PCs are coming.”

Mills and Huber argued that digital networks, server farms, chip manufacture, and information technology had become a new key driver of electricity demand. And, they said, as the digital economy grows, so does demand for super-reliable power — the kind you can’t get from intermittent sources like wind turbines and solar panels.

Huber and Mills touted the policy implications of their analysis. To wire the world, we must electrify the world. For most nations, that means burning more coal. The Kyoto agenda imperils the digital economy, and vice versa.

Others — notably Joe Romm and researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) — argued that the Internet was a minor contributor to electricity demand and potentially a major contributor to energy savings in such areas as supply-chain management, telecommuting, and online purchasing.

Although Mills’s “ballpark” estimates — 8% of the nation’s electric supply absorbed by Internet-related hardware and 13% of U.S. power consumed by the all information technology — were likely much too high in 1999, they may now be close to the mark. On the question of basic trend and direction, Mills was spot on.

Critics scoffed at Mills’s contention that, in 1999, computers and other consumer electronics accounted for a significant share of household electricity consumption. Ten years later, in Gadgets and Gigawatts, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that in many OECD country households, electronic devices — a category that includes televisions, desktop computers, laptops, DVD players and recorders, modems, printers, set-top boxes, cordless telephones, answering machines, game consoles, audio equipment, clocks, battery chargers, mobile phones and children’s games — consumed more electricity than did traditional large appliances. The IEA projected that to operate those devices, households around the world would spend around $200 billion in electricity bills and require the addition of approximately 280 Gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity by 2030. The agency also projected that even with improvements foreseen in energy efficiency, consumption by electronics in the residential sector would increase 250% by 2030. Saturday’s New York Times article further vindicates Mills’s central insight (even if not his specific estimates).

Jonathan Koomey, one of the authors of the LBNL critique of Mills’s 1999 study, estimates that, nationwide, data centers consumed about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or 2% of U.S. electricity use in that year. In a Forbes column published last year, Mills opined that if we factor in three other components of “digital energy ecosystem” — (1) the energy required to transport the data from storage centers to end users, (2) the “electricity used by all the digital stuff on desks and in closets in millions of homes and businesses,” and (3) the energy required to “manufacture all the hardware for the data centers, networks, and pockets, purses and desktops” — then the digital economy’s total appetite “is north of 10% of national electricity use.”

The Times laments that data centers “waste” vast amounts of power. On a typical day, only about 6% to 12% of a center’s computing power is actually utilized, yet most of the facility’s servers will be kept running around the clock. To call that wasteful, however, is to confuse the engineering concept of efficiency with the economic concept. In economics, what matters is value to the consumer. Consumers demand reliable, uninterrupted access to data. Keeping all the servers humming ensures the center can handle unexpected peaks in demand without crashing. A center that saves energy but bogs down or crashes will lose customers or go out of business. As one industry analyst told The Times, “They [data center managers] don’t get a bonus for saving on the electric bill. They get a bonus for having the data center available 99.999 percent of the time.”

Obviously, it is in a center’s interest to find ways to provide the same (or greater) value to consumers at lower cost, including lower energy cost. But, notes Mills, efficiency tends to increase consumption, not reduce it:

Car engine energy efficiency improved 500 percent pound-for-pound from early years to the late 20th century. Greater efficiency made it possible to make better, more featured, safer, usually heavier and more affordable cars. So rising ownership and utilization lead to 400 percent growth in transportation fuel use since WWII. The flattening of automotive energy growth in the West is a recent phenomenon as we finally see near saturation levels in road-trips per year and cars-per-household. We are a long way from saturation on video ‘trips’ on the information highways.

Efficiency gains are precisely what creates and increases overall traffic and energy demand; more so for data than other service or products. From 1950 to 2010, the energy efficiency of information processing improved ten trillion-fold in terms of computations per kWh. So a whole lot more data-like machines got built and used — consequently the total amount of electricity consumed to perform computations increased over 100-fold since the 1950s – if you count just data centers. Count everything we’re talking about here and the energy growth is beyond 300-fold.

Fundamentally, if it were not for more energy-efficient logic processing, storage and transport, there would be no Google or iPhone. At the efficiency of early computing, just one Google data center would consume more electricity than Manhattan. Efficiency was the driving force behind the growth of Internet 1.0 as it will be for the wireless video-centric Internet 2.0.

So what’s the solution? Where Mills once argued that the “Internet Begins with Coal,” he now argues that “The Cloud Begins with Coal (and Fracking)“:

Some see the energy appetite of the Cloud as a problem. Others amongst us see it as evidence of a new global tech boom that echoes the arrival of the automotive age. We’re back to the future, where the microprocessor today as an engine of growth may not be new, anymore than the internal combustion engine was new in 1958. It’s just that, once more, all the components, features and forces are aligned for enormous growth. With that growth we will find at the bottom of this particular digital well, the need to dig more coal, frack more shale….

Yes, argues Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in The Atlantic (Sep. 17, 2012). Gartenstein-Ross is the author of Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror. I haven’t read the book, but judging from the favorable reviews, Gartenstein-Ross has the ear of defense hawks of both parties. Does he offer sound advice on global warming?

In his Atlantic article, Gartenstein-Ross chides Republicans for taking a “decidely unrealistic tack” on climate change. “The available evidence overwhelmingly suggests that climate change is real; that extreme weather events are increasing; and that this dynamic will have an impact on American national security, if it hasn’t already,” he avers. He goes on to blame this summer’s drought on global warming, citing NASA scientist James Hansen’s claim that the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought have “virtually no explanation other than climate change.” (For an alternative assessment, see these posts.) 

Since 2010, notes Gartenstein-Ross, the Department of Defense has classified climate change as a conflict accelerant — a factor exacerbating tensions within and between nations. Well, sure, what else is Team Obama at DOD going to say in an era of tight budgets when no rival superpower endangers our survival? The concept of an ever-deepening, civilization-imperilling climate crisis is an ideal mission-creep accelerant. 

Gartenstein-Ross concludes by urging Republicans to face “reality” and take action on climate change. However, he offers no advice as to what policies they should adopt. Does he favor cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulatory cascade, ’all of the above’? Gartenstein-Ross doesn’t say. He ducks the issue of what economic sacrifices he thinks Republicans should demand of the American people. 

Below is a lightly edited version of a comment I posted yesterday at The Atlantic on Gartenstein-Ross’s article: 

Dear Mr. Gartenstein-Ross,

Some Republicans have taken an “unrealistic tack” on climate change — for example, denying that global warming is real or doubting whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This, however, is an unfortunate consequence of the climate alarm movement’s rhetorical trickery. Al Gore and his allies pretend that once you accept the reality of global warming, then everything else they claim (e.g. sea levels could rise by 20 feet this century) or advocate (cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, Soviet-style production quota for wind turbines) follows inexorably, as night the day. Consequently, some GOP politicians and activists now believe they must deny or question a tautology (“greenhouse gases have a greenhouse effect”) in order to oppose Gore’s narrative of doom and agenda of energy rationing.

As a thoughtful analyst, you should see through this rhetorical trap. Yes, other things being equal, CO2 emissions warm the planet. That, however, does not begin to settle the core scientific issue of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming projected to occur from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations). It tells us nothing about impacts, such as how much Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea level rise by 2100 (BTW, a realistic projection is inches rather than feet or meters). It does not tell us whether the costs of “inaction” are greater or less than the costs of “action.”

James Hansen’s attribution of the ongoing drought to global warming, which you cite, is a testable hypothesis. Patrick Michaels examines how the U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) matches up over time both with the U.S. temperature record and that portion of the record attributable to global temperature trends. Turns out, there is zero correlation between global temperature trends and the PDSI, but a significant correlation between plain old natural climate variability and the PDSI.

One massive fact conveniently swept under the rug by the climate alarm movement is that since the 1920s — a fairly long period of overall warming — global deaths and death rates attributable to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively. The 93% decline in aggregate deaths is remarkable, given that global population has increased about four-fold since 1920. The most deadly form of extreme weather is drought, and since 1920, worldwide deaths and death rates attributable to drought have fallen by an astonishing 99.98% and 99.99%, respectively. 

As Indur Goklany, author of the study just cited explains, the increasing safety of humanity with respect to extreme weather came about not in spite of mankind’s utilization of carbon-based fuels but in large measure because of it. Fertilizers, plastics for packaging, mechanized agriculture, trade between food surplus and food deficit regions, emergency response systems, and humanitarian assistance — advances that have dramatically increased global food security — all presuppose fossil fuels and the wealth of economies powered by fossil fuels.

A just-published study by Jeff Keuter of the George C. Marshall Institute finds that “environmental factors rarely incite conflict between states or within states.” For example, Israel and her Arab neighbors have gone to war several times — but never over access to water. Keuter finds that “efforts to link climate change to the deterioration of U.S. national security rely on improbable scenarios, imprecise and speculative methods, and scant empirical support.”

You mention the hunger crisis of 2008. Ironically, one of the contributing factors was a global warming policy – the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which artificially raises the demand for and price of corn. As you note, soaring corn prices also pull up the price of wheat.

Which brings me to a final point. It is one-sided and, well, risky to assess the security risks of climate change without also assessing the security risks of climate change policies. For example, economic strength is the foundation of military power. A great power cannot have a second-rate economy. Affordable energy is vital to economic growth. Carbon mitigation schemes have a vast potential to chill job creation and growth because they are designed to make energy more costly. That is the main reason Congress and the public rejected cap-n-tax.

The worse the economy, the more painful the trade-offs between guns and butter. How to cut the deficit without gutting core military capabilities is a key issue White House and congressional budget negotiators are grappling with right now. The revival of North America as an energy producing province is one of the few economic bright spots today, a source of new tax revenues as well as new jobs. From a national security perspective, now is the worst possible time to ramp up the already considerable regulatory risks facing the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.