I’ve read claims that AI queries require a lot of energy. Today I heard another claim on the Nerdland Podcast (a popular science podcast here in Belgium): “letting ChatGPT write an email of 100 words requires 70 Wh” (if you’re interested, that’s said at 00:28:05 in this episode).

I though to myself: that’s a lot of energy. 70 Wh is 252,000 Ws (70 W * 3600 s). Assume that it takes 10 seconds to write that email, then it requires 25,200 W of power, or 25 kW. That’s way more than the theoretical maximum I can get here at home from the power grid (9 kW).

So I decided to do some quick & dirty tests with my desktop computer and my powermeter.

First test: measure everything.

Step 1: starting up my desktop computer (connected to my powermeter) and waiting for the different services to startup, required 2.67 Wh of electrical energy:

Step 2: I opened a command prompt, started Ollama, typed a query to generate an email, and waited for the result. By then, the required electrical energy op my desktop computer (since starting up) was 3.84 Wh:

So step 2 took 57 seconds (00:02:36 minus 00:01:39) and required 1.17 Wh (3.84 – 2.67). That’s way less than 70 Wh.

Second test: just measure the query.

I restarted my computer and started Ollama. Then I started my powermeter and pasted my query and waited for the answer:

That took 3 seconds and required 0.236 Wh:

Notice that I have not just measured the electrical energy consumption of Ollama processing my query, but I measured the total electrical energy consumption of my desktop computer while Ollama was processing my query.

0.236 Wh for a computer running Ollama and processing a query is very different than 70 Wh for ChatGPT processing a query. That’s almost 300 times more, so even though my test here is just anecdotal and I’m using another LLM than ChatGPT, I will assume that 70 Wh is a gross overestimation.

FYI: asking Google “what is the electrical energy consumption of chatgpt processing a query”, I find results mentioning between 1 and 10 Wh. That’s closer to my tests than the 70 Wh claim.