14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new report pieced together by researchers working with the Digital Power Group, refrigerators are significantly more environmentally friendly than iPhones are.
Thus, it appears that, throughout the course of an entire year, the average refrigerator burns less energy than the run-off-the-mill iPhone does.
According to Daily Mail, a fridge's yearly energy consumption is one of about 322 kilowatts hours. By contrast, the typical iPhone goes through about 361 kilowatt hours on a yearly basis.
Oddly enough, this difference in how much energy a fridge and an iPhone consume annually is not due to the fact that the latter has to be charged a tad too often.
On the contrary, the average iPhone puts more strain on the grid than a refrigerator does due to the fact that people use this gadget to connect to the Internet and stream data.
Therefore, data centers that make wireless connections and data streaming possible are the ones to blame for the fact that iPhones aren't as green as refrigerators are.
“Although charging up a single tablet or smart phone requires a negligible amount of electricity, using either to watch an hour of video weekly consumes annually more electricity in the remote networks than two new refrigerators use in a year.”
In their report, the researchers argue that, should things continue to unfold in this manner, it will not be long until hourly Internet traffic exceeds the annual Internet traffic recorded in 2000.
Furthermore, it appears that, for the time being, some 1,500 terawatt hours are used by the world's communications systems on a yearly basis. This amount is equal to how much energy was burnt on a global scale back in 1985.
Presently, coal and other dirty fuel sources continue to be the main energy providers for data centers and the like.
As Greenpeace pointed out at one point, “Coal’s dominance arises from the importance of keeping costs down while providing ever-greater quantities of energy to the growing economies, and as the IEA recently noted, the absence of cost-effective alternatives at the scales the world needs.”