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  Date / Time: 5/5/2009 9:07 AM UTC

  Soaring internet usage 'is threatening future of Google and YouTube'
  

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  Ever-increasing internet use is causing a drain on energy resources and threatens the future of Google and YouTube, according to experts.

  They warn that as people become more reliant on computers and search engines, more power will be required to run websites which could lead to power cuts which cost millions of pounds in lost business every hour.

  Scientists estimate that with more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, the energy demands of the internet are increasing by more than 10 per cent each year.

  

  With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, the energy demands of the internet are increasing by more than 10 per cent each year

  And with the recession taking its toll on the computer industry through falling advertising revenues, many online companies will not be able to cope with the extra costs.

  'In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption,' said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.

  He said that the costs of running the web servers and data centres that store online information are rising during a time when the industry's profits are suffering.

  'We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more,' he told the Guardian.

  'If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm.'

  One website which is thought to be suffering the most is YouTube. Now the world's third-biggest website, it offers online videos, but it requires a heavy subsidy from its owner Google.

   

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  A recent report by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as £317 million this year, due to the cost of providing live videos which are incredibly energy-intensive to run.

  Figures show the power usage of the computer industry has gone from being relatively small to overtaking other sectors like the airline industry.

  However, tracking the growth of how much power the internet uses is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

  A study commissioned by Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, showed that US data centres used 61 billion kW of power in 2006, which is enough to supply the whole of the UK with energy for two months and accounts for 1.5 per cent of the electricity used by the US.

  He said that despite the industry's efforts to become more efficient, internet usage was increasing so quickly that companies could not make technical improvements quickly enough to keep up.

  'Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services,' he told the Guardian.

  'It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand.'

  He estimated that the power required to run the internet in the US could grow to 80 billion kW hours this year
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