Proposal Papers for Policy Making and Governmental Action toward Low Carbon Society

LCS-FY2018-PP-15

Impact of Progress of Information Society on Energy Consumption (Vol. 1):
Current Status and Future Prospects for Power Consumption of IT Equipment

  • SDGs7
  • SDGs9
  • SDGs13

Summary

 With the development of the information society, tremendous data exceeding traditional expectations will be handled, and this trend will continue to expand in the future.

 Along with this, we examined how energy consumption will be affected by the expansion of the data through a survey, interviews etc. with a view to 2050. As a result, it is expected that the world information volume (IP traffic) will reach 30 times more than the present in 2030 and 4,000 times in 2050. Assuming that the related technology stays at the present level, electric power consumption concerning information will reach 42PWh annually in 2030 and 5,000PWh in 2050, which is much greater than the current world electricity consumption of about 24PWh. This means that the whole world energy will not be sufficient to support the energy necessary for the IT society without technical progress.

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