TALKING TECH, By.. LEE GOMES
 
What could be "greener" than surfing the Web? You aren't further changing the climate by clogging the road but instead sitting quietly in home and hearth.
 
But maybe it is more complicated than that.
 
Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of Fairchild Semiconductor, thinks so. Computer technology, including the Web, has become a major power hog, he says, and we need to better understand what its true costs are. Not that anyone needs to lay off the keyboard -- at least not yet.
* * *
 
Some people say that information technology consumes 10% of all our electricity. Is it really that much?
 
The number we have is 14%. That is everything from Internet server farms, to what corporations run for IT, to the home desktop. The figures I have seen for server farms are just staggering. They are small towns in the way they use power. They sit and run all the time. They have none of the down time of a home, which, except for a few things like the refrigerator, generally goes to sleep at night.
 
So should people feel guilty when they are online, the way a lot of people feel vaguely guilty when they use their car?
 
I am not sure. I don't think we know what the energy cost of the Internet is, since there are hidden costs that aren't talked about very much, but which I think are very ugly. Consider e-commerce. With regular commerce, you drive down to your neighborhood stores to shop. There are very efficient transportation methods for getting things to stores. But with the Internet, there are fewer stores, but lots of big hubs, along with trucks that go out from those hubs and make lots of little runs. A UPS truck shows up in front of my house nearly every day for a book or a DVD. Probably a gallon of diesel was burned getting it to my house.
 
Does that mean we should use the Web less?
 
I am not a Luddite. I am a huge fan of the modern information-technology structure. But the more bits you demand from your house, the more server farms you will cause to be built. In terms of whether we should feel guilty, usually one way of knowing that is knowing what the true cost of something is. But we don't yet know the true cost of IT yet. But I am sure it's not as clean as it looks.
 
Everyone knows the way appliances like refrigerators have gotten more efficient over the years. Haven't computers?
 
Most of the computer efficiency standards so far have applied to desktop computers, and involve sleep modes. Since the average home computer is off more than it is on, the efficiency of its sleep mode is probably more important than that of its work mode. But the opposite is true for servers, since they are on all the time. But current regulations don't address how efficient servers need to be when they are running; you are allowed to be as inefficient as you want to be. So the real push for server rooms will be to have bleeding-edge efficiencies mandated for them.
 
How much more efficient do you think we can make servers?
 
Today they run in the range of 30% to 40% efficiency, and I am guessing that can be pushed up into the 70% to 80% efficiency. I think we can cut waste in half.