I’m sure you’ve already noticed that when you enter sites that have Flash content, your notebook starts revving up the fan to cool down the CPU. Most of the time, this Flash content is just useless, blinking, scrolling things that serve the only purpose of wasting energy.
Well, the other day we were wondering how will this compare to the CO2 emissions of a car… our rough numbers follow. This is not a thorough research, it’s just a quick calculation, but we believe it communicates the general idea.
The first thing we did was measuring how much energy was drained from a notebook [1] battery, while browsing the nytimes.com. Two measures were taken, one with Flash enabled and the other with a Flash block plugin.
Browsing nytimes.com for ten minutes gave us these numbers:
That’s about 0.52Wh of difference (Flash consumption) in 10 minutes.
According to alexa.com, the average daily time on nytimes.com is 4.8 minutes, so if every visitor had a a similar notebook, they will consume 0.25Wh per visit, just for Flash content.
According to compete.com, the nytimes.com site has about 60 million visits monthly. Just multiplying the numbers gives about 15 MWh in a month (that’s mega watt hour).
According to Wikipedia [2] the amount of CO2 emmitted while generating 1kWh of energy with coal is about 1kg, so 15 MWh amount to 15,000 kg of CO2.
To put the numbers in perspective, a new Toyota Prius [3] emits 89 g/km of CO2, so 15,000 kg of CO2 amount to 168,000 km. According to EPA [4], the average american drives 1600 km/month (1000 miles/month), so that’s about what 100 Prius emit in that month.
Hence, just the Flash content in nytimes.com, which is mostly useless scrolling things and blinking ads, emits the same CO2 as 100 Toyota Prius.
Footnotes and references:
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