4.3 How to save energy by greening energyinefficient
websites
In the current web environment, we examine how to effectively
reduce energy without any change to software or
hardware. Based on Eqn. 2, the energy consumption ratio
of Flash websites is 42% in total: 94/59/43/34% in
Korea/China/Japan/US. We examine the possibility of reducing
energy loss by focusing on energy-inefficient websites.
First, we calculate the amount of energy consumption
caused by web browsing in Table 5. The major factor for
energy consumption is the number of visitors for each website.
Therefore, the US and China have much greater energy
consumption than Japan and Korea.
In particular, we look at heavily energy-consuming top 10
websites in each country, and Flash websites among the top
10. As shown in Table 5, the energy consumption amount
of the top 10 websites reaches 72% in total: 82% in Korea,
67% in Japan, 66% in the US, and 57% in China. Among the
top 10, we selected only Flash websites and computed their
energy consumption ratio. In Korea, where Flash websites
are 9 out of the top 10, their energy consumption percentage
is 79%. In China and Japan, with 5 and 4 Flash websites,
respectively, in the top 10, Flash websites consume 30% and
1Naver is the most popular website in Korea that provides
the web searching service.
21 kgCO2 = 0.425 · 1 kWh.
3We calculate the electricity bill in Korea (1 kWh = 8.9
cents [24]).