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So much more electricity needed

It is well known that consumption of energy is growing too fast with today’s digital trends. The growth took off already with music, pictures, PDFs and videos. Then we got the YouTube video production explosion, Bitcoins and AI. An interesting Economist article notes that Americans now spend more time on watching YouTube than any other source of content. It would be interesting to get and-to-end energy consumption estimate from here to the next 3 years per phenomena.

Most if not all global giants are using green - solar, wind and nuclear produced electricity - but as long as others still use so much fossil produced, we need to find ways to address also the digital sector.  And naturally in parallel get more green local production - all of us - at work and at home. Microsoft aiming at buying and restarting Rhode Island is good news. 
 
Many other energy cutting programs should be in place in digital services.
Overall migration away from PDFs to structured data is one. A study estimated that structure electronic invoicing processes could save even 10 million trees/year… E-receipts could probably save even more as the re-use of the proof of purchase credential (per line) both at work and at home is stretching into so many sectors (travel expensing, accounting, budgeting, insurance claims, co2reporting, product passport distribution, etc). Banks could and should do more to elimate needs to mail and send PDFs and naturally push both e-invoicing and e-receipts to customers.
 
EUDI-compliant wallets replacing data transfers with credentials, furthering decentralised data storage is another one. Again banks should have ready plans to both deploy wallets, help customers - especially SMEs, start receiving verified data from customer wallets and send credentials when customers need them.
 
An overall estimate of trends would be useful here as well.
 
More effiecient, ethical and energy efficent AI
And of course there should be an estimate in place of how much less energy AI will need in the Trust Infrastructure era - where it always will use verified data (instead of guessing) and be sure also of the ethical aspect. Making this mandatory could probably cut down on energy usage in the regulation work...

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