Each of Google's two datacenters in The Dalles, Ore., is as large as a football field. That's room for a lot of computers. (Craig Mitchelldyer/Getty Images)

According to an article by Bobbie Johnson published in Sunday’s Guardian, Internet usage is pushing electrical usage skyward, which in turn is driving up the cost of maintaining a Web site. Johnson said that industry experts are concerned to the point at which energy use might affect how we use the Internet.

Sun Microsystems Vice President Subodh Bapat told Johnson that the financial recession makes it even more imperative to curb the rising cost of electricity relating to Internet use. But that hasn’t stopped the number of people who use the Internet from increasing. In fact, scientists are saying that Internet energy use is rising by 10 percent each year.

YouTube is one Web site that uses an awful lot of juice. Johnson said a Credit Suisse financial analysis of the company suggested that energy costs could force the company to lose $470 million in 2009. However, that’s an estimate; YouTube, like many other Internet properties, keeps its actual numbers quiet.

The Naked Scientists interviewed Google RE<C Program Manager Eric Teetzel, who said that a Google search uses 0.0003 kWh of electricity, which is the equivalent of about 0.2 g CO2. Johnson wrote another article earlier this year about Google‘s data center at The Dalles, Ore., which is estimated to use 103 MW of power when it reaches full capacity in 2011.

Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, did a study for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in which he found that data centers in the United States use 61 billion kilowatt-hours of energy every year. That’s 1.5 percent of the total electricity usage of the country. Or enough to power the whole United Kingdom for two months. And Brown told Johnson that he expects Internet electricity usage to hit 80 billion kilowatt-hours this year. This doesn’t seem surprising, given the push toward cloud computing and doing work on remote servers in data centers.

Hosting companies can do a lot to improve this by investing in more energy-efficient machines, or by locating data centers near natural sources of power, like wind or hydroelectric systems, which can help reduce the carbon footprint of the Internet. Google’s facility in The Dalles, for example, uses electricity generated by a nearby hydroelectric dam.

For more on data centers and related technologies, take a look at these articles:

How Web Servers Work
How YouTube Works
How Cloud Computing Works
How the Google File System Works