Carbon footprint calculators
18/07/20 15:15
IT engineering colleagues Stephen Makonin and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva and I are working on a good streaming carbon footprint calculator. Here's what we have so far.
Marks, Makonin, and Rodriguez-Silva, Calculating the carbon footprint of a streaming program
(in Marks, Clark, Lucas Hilderbrand, Jason Livingston, and Denise Oleksiczjuk, forthcoming, Media+Environment):
Length of the streaming video in hours
x gigabytes per hour for a given resolution (Summerson 2018):
480 pixels: ~792 MB/hour
720p: ~1.3 GB/hour
1080p: ~1.9-2.55 GB/hour
1440p: ~2.8 GB/hour
4K: ~3.5-7 GB/hour
x energy intensity: 4.91 kWh/GB
x number of unique viewers
x 0.007 metric tons of CO2 (Environmental Protection Agency 2020)
= carbon footprint.
Joseph Clark’s energy intensity calculator, also in our article in Media+Environment:
Multiply file size in gigabytes by 5 kWh/GB to get energy in kilowatts.
Example: Streaming a high resolution copy of a 10 minute newsreel (500MB) is about 2.5 kWh. That, according to the owner’s manual for Joe’s clothes dryer, is about the equivalent of drying one load of laundry.
Marks, Makonin, and Rodriguez-Silva, Calculating the carbon footprint of a streaming program
(in Marks, Clark, Lucas Hilderbrand, Jason Livingston, and Denise Oleksiczjuk, forthcoming, Media+Environment):
Length of the streaming video in hours
x gigabytes per hour for a given resolution (Summerson 2018):
480 pixels: ~792 MB/hour
720p: ~1.3 GB/hour
1080p: ~1.9-2.55 GB/hour
1440p: ~2.8 GB/hour
4K: ~3.5-7 GB/hour
x energy intensity: 4.91 kWh/GB
x number of unique viewers
x 0.007 metric tons of CO2 (Environmental Protection Agency 2020)
= carbon footprint.
Joseph Clark’s energy intensity calculator, also in our article in Media+Environment:
Multiply file size in gigabytes by 5 kWh/GB to get energy in kilowatts.
Example: Streaming a high resolution copy of a 10 minute newsreel (500MB) is about 2.5 kWh. That, according to the owner’s manual for Joe’s clothes dryer, is about the equivalent of drying one load of laundry.
