Pub. 4 2014 Issue 2

23 MINING FOCUS SELF-PERFORMANCE from our Engineers, Managers and Crews drives CONFIDENCE into safety, quality and schedule. Visit your ONE SOURCE for safe and successful projects, AmesConstruction.com/BootsUEC ©2014,AllRightsReserved,Thestylized“A” logoand thecompanynameare registered trademarksofAmesConstruction, Inc. BOOTS ON THE GROUND! WIRED continued on page 25 What about Smart Phones? Smart phones areanother contribution that Applehas transformed into the glamorous and essential. They’ve been around since about 1993, but they were so expensive that most people would never have considered buying them. Although they are still expensive, the thing that put them intomost people’s pockets was a marketing scheme: sign a contract, and get a really expensive but beautiful smart phone for a relatively small amount of up- front money. The Power behind the Devices As these devices have proliferated in our lives, they have also taken over possibly every outlet in your home, because everyone you live with wants to have either a tablet or a smart phone, and maybe both. And, these devices need to be charged frequently. Have you ever wondered how much electricity it takes to charge your toys? It may not be much on an individual level, but only looking at the electricity needed to charge a device is deceptive. According toMark P. Mills, a physicist andwidely publishedwriter, the energy required to support our use of today’s technology is actually much larger than you would think. In other words, the support infrastructure that makes your tablet and your smart phone (as well as other electronic devices) useful has enormous energy needs. Charging a small device takes only a little amount of electricity at a time, but there are other aspects to the situation that make the energy numbers explode fast: • If you watch one hour of video each week on your phone or tablet, the remote networks that provide you with your video will use more electricity than you would need to run two refrigerators for an entire year. • An estimated ten percent of the electricity that is generated throughout the world goes to what Mark P. Mills calls the Information-Communications- Technologies (ICT) ecosystem. That ten percent is about 1500 TWh every year — TWh means Terawatt hour, and it is equivalent to a billion kilowatts — or, in other words, all the electricity generated by Germany and Japan. • The ICT ecosystem is using as much electricity as the amount of power that lit the world in 1985. • We are also using 50 percent more energy than the amount of energy required by global aviation. • The Internet continues its explosive growth. The amount of annual Internet traffic in 2000 is now almost the same amount as one hour of Internet traffic today.