The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy rocks. It has put numbers to what I've long suspected to be true: computers save tons of energy, while using less energy than the lightbulb that lights the workstation. And now we know how much.

The council's new study focused on a metric called "energy intensity." Basically, that's the amount of energy necessary to produce a dollar of economic output.

The first major drop in energy intensity occured after the oil crisis in the 1970s. That was a cost-based drop, not generally the ideal.

Then, after OPEC lost its stranglehold, energy intensity stopped dropping because energy was once again cheap. But then, starting in the late 1990s, energy intensity began to drop significantly again. This drop was unrelated to energy costs and was, in fact, a technologically spurred change.

Computers were helping us become more efficient -- first, by using their power to design more efficient practices. Second, and much more significantly, computers allowed people and things to travel digitally, instead of physically.

Telecommuting a couple days per week, reading news online, emails, document downloads, and instant messages all let people and things travel while consuming much smaller amounts of energy. What's more, online shopping has reduced trips to retail stores, resulting in significant energy savings.

Energy intensity has continued to drop more than 2% every year since the Internet first appeared. Without the Internet, the paper's authors suggest that we would need one billion more barrels per oil per year!

Indeed, ever kilowatt/hour we spend on the Internet looks to have saved about 10 kilowatt/hours of energy.

Not that I need another reason to spend time online...

Via CSMonitor