The Energy Demand of ICT: A Historical Perspective and Current Methodological Challenges

This chapter provides an overview of energy demand issues in the field of ICT with a focus on the history of measuring, modelling and regulating ICT electricity consumption and the resulting methodological challenges. While the energy efficiency of ICT hardware has been dramatically improving and will continue to improve for some decades, the overall energy used for ICT is still increasing. The growing demand for ICT devices and services outpaces the efficiency gains of individual devices. Worldwide per capita ICT electricity consumption exceeded 100 kWh/year in 2007 (a value which roughly doubles if entertainment equipment is included) and is further increasing. Methodological challenges include issues of data collection and modelling ICT devices and services, assessing the entire life cycle of ICT devices and infrastructures, ac-counting for embedded ICT, and assessing the effect of software on ICT energy consumption. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_4 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-110003 Accepted Version Originally published at: Aebischer, Bernard; Hilty, Lorenz (2015). The energy demand of ICT: a historical perspective and current methodological challenges. In: Hilty, Lorenz; Aebischer, Bernard. ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Cham: Springer, 71-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_4 This Accepted Author Manuscript is copyrighted by Springer. The final publication will be available at Springer via http://link.springer.com/bookseries/11156 by end of August 2014. Suggested citation: Aebischer, B., Hilty, L.M.: The Energy Demand of ICT: A Historical Perspective and Current Methodological Challenges. In: Hilty, L.M., Aebischer, B. (eds.) ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Springer, Heidelberg (2014, in press) The Energy Demand of ICT: A Historical Perspective and Current Methodological Challenges Bernard Aebischer and Lorenz M. Hilty 1 Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] 2 University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] 3 Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, St. Gallen, Switzerland 4 Centre for Sustainable Communications CESC, KTH Royal Institute of Technology,