How much energy and CO2 my website saved in 2023

My website runs on 100% renewable energy. That means every time a web page is loaded, the energy comes from the sun, wind and sea.

Switching to a renewable web host is really simple, and in the case of Krystal, it is also cheap, so there are many reasons to make the switch. If you do not switch, you will be permitting the use of fossil fuels and often coal-fired energy to proliferate.

However, I thought is was worth working out whether this matters and how much it matters. Are websites that harmful? Can clicking around someone’s website be polluting? In order to work this out I would have to work out how much fossil fuel energy, and the associated carbon emissions, was saved in the process.

Bananas

According to Mike Berners-Lee in his book How Bad Are Bananas, he discusses the subject of lots of people making small changes to affect the world in a huge way. In particular he hypothetically suggests taxing 1p per email. This would result in:

In 2019, the world’s 3.9 billion email users sent 294 billion emails each day. Just a penny per message…could go to tackling world poverty, or even renewable energy. The world’s carbon footprint would go down by 2.4 million tonnes, and there would be a £480 billion annual fund

So, actually, when thinking about the number of website views each year, if everyone used renewable energy for their servers the resulting CO2 savings, would be huge.

How do I stack up?

Using Google Analytics, I worked out that my website clocked up roughly 3000 page views in 2023 (an increase on 2022 🙂 )

My website pages average 0.5g C02 per page load. So 0.5g x 3000 = 1500g CO2e

So that doesn’t seem like much, and it isn’t. But the point is that if every website in the world did the same, we’d be saving huge amounts.  There are an estimated 202.9 million active websites in the world and if each of those saved the same as my website that would be 304350000000g CO2e – or 304350000kg – or 304350 tonnes. And in reality most sites are much more visited and bigger than mine.

Interesting? Kind of. I’m sure Mike Berners-Lee would think so.