"If the Federal Council is now considering abolishing the program — or at least withdrawing the federal contribution — it is mainly because of the windfall effects it generates," explains Philippe Thalmann, professor of environmental economics at EPFL.
"Today, 70% of our results come from abroad, while 70% of our investments are made in our historic service territory in Switzerland," says Cédric Christmann, Chief Executive Officer of Primeo Energie.
With the proliferation of digital services, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence, digital infrastructures and platforms generate very significant energy consumption. An analysis in "True or False" format.
To put an end to the many misconceptions circulating about digital pollution, we propose to answer the main questions that the Swiss ask in the form of a first "True or False".
We do not see it, its effects are not immediately perceptible, and yet we generate it every day. Digital pollution is indeed an increasingly worrying environmental concern. Because to support our various online activities, datacenters and computer servers are multiplying. These infrastructures are very electricity-hungry, notably to keep temperatures low within the vast spaces where our precious data are stored.
The energy consumption linked to our digital usage now reaches significant proportions, equaling or even surpassing some already very energy-intensive sectors, such as rail or air transport. Take the technology sector as an example: to meet its growing energy demand, notably to power generative artificial intelligences, the American giants are considering turning more to nuclear power. They are favoring SMRs in particular, small modular reactors designed to be mass-produced.
In Switzerland, while the country seems to be consolidating its reputation as a digital stronghold on the international stage, this issue proves to be highly concerning. At the national level, nearly 8% of our electricity is thus consumed by Internet-related infrastructures. By comparison, the rail sector uses about 5%, while public lighting consumes less than 1%.
While online services and content are available and consumed continuously, it is nevertheless possible to adopt simple actions to change things, or at least minimize our environmental impact. Moreover, some energy solutions are emerging, notably allowing the recovery of residual heat emitted by datacenters.
As many misconceptions circulate about this digital pollution, we propose to answer the main questions that the Swiss are asking in the form of a first “True or False”.
Does a full email inbox consume more energy than one that is regularly sorted and emptied?
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Although it is often said that regularly emptying your mailbox is part of good digital practices to adopt for a sustainable approach, in reality this produces almost no difference. On the contrary, cleaning up your mailbox would even have the opposite effect since this action requires energy. "It is indeed better not to worry about this aspect regarding your mailbox," emphasizes Thomas Jacobsen, spokesperson for Infomaniak.
In reality, emails occupy very little space on servers which, in the cloud, are moreover shared among different clients. In terms of storage, it is above all photos and videos that use resources in considerable proportions. "Not to mention that, for security reasons, cloud storage is always duplicated, even triplicated. Without knowing it, by storing files online, you are actually storing them on two to three servers in different datacenters," adds Thomas Jacobsen.
Regarding the mailing issue, governments would do well to look into the question of commercial messages and other spams sent willy-nilly to limit this useless digital pollution. "And as best practices for cloud storage, we can only call on users to ask themselves whether images or videos saved for years without having been viewed are really worth keeping. There are indeed enormous quantities of data stored online that are never accessed and that could be deleted without impact for their owners," highlights the Infomaniak spokesperson.
Certain providers, notably in the field of email, already apply this logic by warning inactive users of the deletion of their account in case of prolonged non-login. "At Infomaniak, we will soon raise our customers' awareness of the environmental impact of digital storage by indicating the CO₂ equivalent of their products," adds Thomas Jacobsen.
Are data centers as much an energy sink as an asset?
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With about a hundred datacenters on its territory, Switzerland is among the countries that have the most. To give an order of magnitude, these infrastructures cover an area of more than 150,000 m², the equivalent of about 24 football fields. Alone, these datacenters consume more than 3.5% of all the country's energy.
Although their operation entails a continuous and significant energy consumption, it is nevertheless possible to take advantage of them, notably by recovering the heat they emit to feed district heating networks. Various projects in this direction have thus emerged in Switzerland.
In the industrial zone of Plan-les-Ouates, in Geneva, several industrial buildings are connected to a district heating network, supplied by the residual heat of the Safehost hosting company's datacenter (about 10 megawatts).
For its part, Infomaniak has just inaugurated a datacenter capable of recovering 100% of its energy. At full power, this facility will be able to reinject 1.7 MW (14.9 GWh/year) into the Geneva thermal network, enough to heat 6,000 Minergie-A households per year.
Are cryptocurrencies really energy-intensive?
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Cryptocurrencies are indeed very energy-intensive, mainly because of their "mining", i.e. the computational operations that generate them and validate the transactions made. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, worldwide electricity consumption linked to bitcoin alone amounted to 121 TWh in 2023, more than double Switzerland's electricity consumption, which OFEN estimated at 56 TWh for the same year.
Currently, the share of energy from sustainable sources consumed by cryptocurrencies remains minimal. In the United States, bitcoin mining would thus use an amount of electricity equivalent to the annual consumption of five million households.
Is ChatGPT really more energy-hungry than Google Search?
Beyond electricity, it should be noted that AIs, like all online digital services, also consume a lot of water. Why? Mainly to cool datacenters, which operate continuously. By comparison, AI platforms like ChatGPT or Bard use more water than a simple Internet search.
According to a preprint from the University of Riverside, California, a short exchange with ChatGPT would consume about 50 cl of water, the equivalent of a small plastic bottle. With almost 1.5 billion monthly users, the scale of the problem becomes clear.
Does AI represent as much an energy drain as an asset for decarbonizing our society?
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Despite their very significant energy consumption, AIs can play a key role in the fight against global warming. Optimizing industrial production chains, notably through predictive maintenance, or optimizing agriculture through more precise weather analyses, are some examples.
Applied to buildings, AI allows the analysis of a multitude of real-time data to optimize their energy efficiency. Indoor and outdoor temperature, weather data, or occupants' habits and preferences regarding thermal comfort are thus taken into account, not to mention the characteristics of the building, such as its insulation or orientation.
An example with the Fribourg-based startup YORD. The company has developed a solution capable of analyzing the thermal behavior of buildings. Its objective: to optimize the settings of heating systems in order to reduce waste, which represents, at the scale of the Swiss building stock, 3.2 million tons of CO₂ and an annual cost of 2.6 billion francs.
"Our technology is based on algorithms that use data collected by our wireless sensors placed inside buildings, as well as on weather forecasts," explains Sébastien Bron, Director of the startup. He adds that by combining this information, "its system can anticipate the building's thermal dynamics and automatically adjust the heating parameters." On average, an installation equipped with this system allows energy savings of 23.8%.
This article has been automatically translated using AI. If you notice any errors, please don't hesitate to contact us.
"If the Federal Council is now considering abolishing the program — or at least withdrawing the federal contribution — it is mainly because of the windfall effects it generates," explains Philippe Thalmann, professor of environmental economics at EPFL.
"Today, 70% of our results come from abroad, while 70% of our investments are made in our historic service territory in Switzerland," says Cédric Christmann, Chief Executive Officer of Primeo Energie.
