Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spam Could Power 2.4 Million Homes

Following on from my earlier post (in a general environmental theme) I wanted to share this article that I spotted on [Geeks Are Sexy].

A report by McAfee has outlined that the total energy wasted by spam emails could power 2.4 million homes a year. The report, which was produced with environmental consultants ICF International, indicates that spam emails are responsible for 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy used each year. Surprisingly (to me at least) the report shows that the actual development and mailing of the emails only accounts for 7% of that energy, the vast majority of the energy is used to filter the unwanted messages.

The report also shows that the total energy usage produces 17 million tons of CO2, the same amount as 3 million cars.

1 comment:

ace said...

At first I thought it was about cans of spam. There is no way of stopping email spam. It's hard to believe that spam can power homes. It's more like wishful thinking.