YouTube uses about one percent of the world's power

Following on from my post in relation to the amount of data that is uploaded to YouTube in the form of videos (here) I decided to look into just how much power YouTube uses to provide the video streaming services that it does.

To do this I obviously have to use numbers that I can find on the Web and I am unable to vouch for the integrity of these numbers. Data and information gleaned from the Web does need to be used carefully because it is often either wrong or warped.

With that in mind, according to the site 'TheFactSource' YouTube's annual power consumption is 243.6TWh (tera-watt hours).

The worldwide electricity consumption in 2020 is forecast to be 21,372TWh.

Based on this, all by itself YouTube consumes slightly over one percent of the entire world's power generation—1.1398 percent to be precise.

The Fact Source say that the average American household consumes 10.766KWh per year. This means that the power consumed by YouTube would power the average American household for about two billion years! To look at it another way, YouTube's annual power consumption could power every one of the 127 million households in America for about eight years.

The above is based purely on the power that YouTube itself consumes. But people viewing videos from YouTube also burns power.

An article on The Verge from May 2019 tells us that the world watches a billion hours of YouTube videos every day and that this produces the equivalent of 10 million tons (not tonnes)* of carbon dioxide annually.

A long essay on the Fortune Web site talks about data's massive carbon footprint. It points out that in America alone in late 2019 there were three million data centres.

The Fortune article records that China's data centres emitted 99 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 in this is forecast to increase by at least 60 percent in the next five years (from 2018).

In this article I have focused on YoutTube, but now I am wondering just how much environmental damage is being caused by the entire 'Web' world of Facebook, WhatsApp, Spotify (imagine how much storage they need for 'all the music in the world in at least two compression formats'), Tidal (more music storage with much larger files—higher quality), Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pintrest, TikTok, Vemeo, cloud storage in general (e.g., OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple's iDrive, IceDrive, imgur, freeimage, PBase, ViewBug, etc.,), WordPress, SquareSpace, and many more. I actually find it a little scary to think about. Oh ... and let's not forget the massive video storage space use by the thousands of porn sites.

* A tonne is 1,000 kg; a ton is 907.2 kg.