Pub. 4 2014 Issue 2

25 MINING FOCUS OUR FUTURE through Mining CONSTRUCTING since 1911 Ben Mills 801.526.6078 Ruben.Mills@gcinc.com WIRED continued from page 23 • We are now measuring our energy usage in terms of the zettabyte. (A zettabyte is the same as a billion terabytes. If you took the number 2, copied it 70 times, and multiplied all 70 together, that’s a zettabyte.) How canwe possibly use that much energy? It’s because of data transfer. Moving bits, it turns out, is a bigger business thanmoving people and things. Howmuchmore?Would you believe twice as big a slice of theGDPas it takes to transport more physical items? At over $1 trillion, the information sector is the one part of the economy that is growing faster than anything else. This shouldn’t really surprise you once you think about it. After all, it is an entire ecosystem of information and data. Here’s the breakdown: • Data centers that house supercomputers on a warehouse scale. The power they need has nearly doubled in the last five years. • Communications networks for broadbandwired andwireless communication. • Manufacturing facilities that make all the ICT hardware. • The products themselves: wireless electronics, such as tablets and phones, and other electronic products such as televisions. We don’t knowactual numbers for the amount of energy required; it takes a while to gather data, and by the time it’s gathered, it isn’t up-to-date anymore. What we do know is that we are underestimating the amount of energy being used. Wireless networks, which are the direction everything is going, require more energy than legacy networks involving wires. That high- speed LTE architecture you see so heavily advertised all the time covers the same physical area but requires 60 timesmore energy. Where do we get all that power? The short answer, today, is from coal. Coal is the main fuel source used to generate electricity, in the U.S. and in the world. In fact, coal was used to create 68 percent of the global energy produced during the last decade. Coal is going to continue to be the fuel of choice for information technology because we don’t have any other fuel source that provides enough affordable and reliable energy. Coal currently provides 42 percent of the energy we use, with natural gas providing 25 percent, nuclear energy 19 percent, and renewables contributing 13 percent. The remaining one percent is energy from oil and other liquids. By 2040, some experts estimate that with increasing use of natural gas and more production from renewables, the percentage of our energy produced fromcoal will reduce to 35 percent. Even if that is the case, coal will continue to be our major energy source for decades to come. Surprise: you may never look at your electronic toys the same way again. X