Second Life is not Sustainable

What has a virtual world got to do with CO2 emissions? Electricity. Second Hype creator Linden Lab consumes an enormous amount of electricity on its 4,000 servers that support 10,000 to 15,000 avatars at a time . . . and it's just getting started. Nicholas Carr ran some numbers. He says an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. That's lower than the average human being in the United States who uses about 7,702 kWh a year. ''But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.'' Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians.