Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn’t possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it’s extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.
This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.
This also means the amount of emissions per user will go down the more users they get. It’s not very fair to compare something new to something that’s been around for decades in something that is based solely on the amount of users they have. I hate starlink, but this report is trash.
Additionally, existing users are mostly in urban centers with very efficient infrastructure, starlink gives high bandwidth internet everywhere.
I’d like to see the CO2e cost of giving a user in the middle of Idaho or Montana a 100Mbps connection.
Thank you, I was wondering how high the emissions could possibly be for Internet access from the customer’s perspective. I figured simply owning a car probably smashed even “30x as much” as other ISPs
They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn’t possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it’s extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.