A year ago it was estimated that (using some fuzzy, maybe 10x too pessimistic math), that ChatGPT uses as much electricity as 17,000 US homes. This was reported as some sort of travesty to the environment (something I care about, for what it's worth), but "numbers without context" is a classic way to lie with statistics, so let's put that number in context. There are currently about 146 million homes in the United States, so ChatGPT in early 2024 could be said to use 0.01% as much power as homes. Not 1%, 0.01%.

As a reminder, there are further studies that think that estimate is 10x its actual value, but ChatGPT and its competitors have grown since then, so let's go with it anyway.

But okay, let’s say that number shocks you. Now let’s consider how many people are using the product. 17,000 homes divided by 200 million users (at the time) brings us to each person’s energy use amounting to 0.0085% of an average home.

Put another way, it's like someone who brings home $4,000 per month looking at their budget and identifying that 34¢ stick of gum as the thing they need to cut to reach their budget goals. I guess it's something, but it's not exactly going to move the needle and certainly isn't the reason your spending is out of control.

Reducing my tech carbon footprint

What this exercise did get me thinking about was my tech carbon footprint on the whole. What tech-related things am I doing that’s using the most electricity? As established above, ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be a big opportunity for savings, but how does it compare to other techie things I’ve doing? If we’re having a logical debate here, then surely I can make up for using ChatGPT a few times a day by reducing my use elsewhere, right?

Let’s figure it out. How much time can I use other things in my tech life less to make up for 20 ChatGPT requests per day?

  • I could play 20 seconds less on my gaming PC per day.
  • I could turn my WiFi router off when I leave the house or when I’m sleeping, as 5 minutes less per day would offset my usage.
  • I could turn my Synology NAS off for 4 minutes per day. This would make sense as my WiFi would also be out much of the day, so I’d easily be able to turn it off much more than that.
  • I could use my MacBook Pro for 8 minutes less per day,
  • It’s hard to get exact numbers here, but it seems running my own Mastodon server is quite inefficient compared to just hopping onto a large server, and costs more energy than doing my ChatGPT requests.

I could keep going, but I have some very real options for not only offsetting my ChatGPT usage, but also radically reducing my tech energy footprint overall. The easiest win for me is scheduling my Synology to power down overnight. In theory this could be an annoyance if I’m away from home and need to get a file that’s stored there, but this is such a rare thing I can’t imagine it’ll bite me. I’ve set my drive to turn off at 10pm and come back on at 6am, so 8 hours saved per day, which offsets somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 ChatGPT requests, so I’m already coming out way ahead here. I've done this for the past month, so I'll expect my acolades to roll in any time now. 😉

Another opportunity is my gaming PC, which uses a lot of power when I’m playing games. I could play a few minutes less per week, although I’m not sure how to measure this.

This last one hurts, but if my concern is tech energy use, it’s insane that I’m spending money and energy to have a Mastodon server all to myself that’s constantly pushing and pulling info from the ActivityPub network. Given the fixed baseline energy costs of running a server, it would make so much more sense for me to join mastodon.social where I'd be a nearly zero increase in energy use. Not to get too controversial, but wouldn’t it also be better for there to be fewer ActivityPub servers out there? That would be less fixed overhead, less energy spent duplicating data across the network, and less additional overhead per user, right?

Bring it all together

I didn’t write this post to suggest we should all use as much energy as possible, screw the environment, let’s just burn it all down. My intention was to present the same ChatGPT and other LLM energy use numbers you see in alarmist articles in a different way to show that you can tell different stories depending on how you present the same data. Do LLMs use more energy than a lot of other digital actions? Yeah, they seem to, but the base number is so microscopically small that we still aren’t dealing with large numbers in the grand scheme of things. I look forward to people replying with feelings, not numbers to disagree with this.

I also think it’s really important to recognize that there are parts of our tech lives that most LLM haters would call “cute” or “delightfully nerdy” that are objectively way more impactful on energy consumption than doing some chatbot requests. As far as I can tell, no one has called a Synology user a monster for running a NAS in their home, but I just saved the equivalent of 1,000 daily ChatGPT requests by turning mine off while I’m sleeping. I could save even more energy if I used a centralized social network or at the very least used a big server on a decentralized one.

I strongly believe that the way forward for society is to aggressively advance zero-emission (or very low emission) energy sources so we can get to a world where the amount of energy we use isn’t a major concern. 20% of US energy comes from renewables, as does 43% in the UK, 30% in China, and 85% in Iceland. There’s work to be done for sure, but progress is being made. If your concern is reducing use in the short run as we get to that world, then it’s a good idea to look at your tech life on the whole to see where you personally can move the needle. I’m willing to bet even the ChatGPT enthusiasts can find a dozen things they’re doing that slurp up considerably more power on a daily basis.