I know, this could sound a bit strange to ask such a question.
After all, since its beginning, SL has been recognized for its capacity to connect people, and thus to potentially replace real meetings with virtual features (and reduce energy dedicated to transportations, etc) …

However,  an interesting article has been published in les echos this week. Les Echos is the no1 french business daily newspaper (our national FT). The article discusses about the latest Gartner report saying that the Data Center consumes a lot of energy and could be very bad for environmnent.
So far, no big news. But the journalist reported in his article the calculation of Nick Carrs about Linden Lab’s 4000 data centers consumption – these 4000 data centers prequire 1.752 kWh of electricity to work, which represents 1.17 tons of carbon equivalent …

If you divide this consumption by the overall SL population, each avatar produces more carbon that a brazilian citizen, according to this calculation …

o_O  Impressive …

What do you think  about these figures ? Have you already seen them somewhere ?

Sources :
The orginal article (translated over google)
Click here
The source for this article : Nicholas Carr’s blog
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php

Pierre from Paris.