On Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 12:12 PM Jaro Reinders via ghc-devs <ghc-devs@haskell.org> wrote:
I've done a bit of research now, mainly based on Jegham et
al. "How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon
Footprint of LLM Inference"
They list the energy consumption of DeepSeek-R1 (671B params) to
be ~29 kW at 10k input token and 1.5k output token scales
On Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 12:45:51PM +0200, Luite Stegeman via ghc-devs wrote:
The table doesn't say 29kW, it says 29Wh for 1500 output tokens with
10k input tokens, i.e. energy per token, not power.
That's right.
Here's a different figure: median energy per query of 0.34 Wh[1]
My *guess* is that an *extremely* intense user of a typical coding
agent with chain of thought might use about one query per 10
seconds[2], which means a power of
0.34 Wh * 3600 s/h / 10s = 122.4Wh / h ~= 0.12kWh / h
This is 200 times less than the figure you quoted, so even if it's off
by an order of magnitude the conclusion will still be that agentic
coding emits far less CO2 than your analysis.
From the same study, most datacenters use around 0.3 kg of CO2
equivalent per kWh (Table 1), so DeepSeek R1 uses about 8.7
kgCO2e/h.
Using my 0.12kWh / h above, this would be
0.3 kg CO2e / kWh * 0.12 kWh / h = 0.036 kg CO2e / h
That means using a single agent for ~400 hours is equivalent to a
return flight from Austin Texas to Zurich (3500 kg CO2e; source:
online tool), which I find an unjustifiable amount of emissions,
but I guess some members of the community do already make such a
trip once a year.
Based on 3500 kg CO2e per flight, this is the equivalent of
3500 kg CO2e per flight / (0.036 kg CO2e / h)
= 97,000 hours per flight equivalent
= 48 years per flight equivalent (2000 hours per year)
= 1 long and hopefully productive career
I think this shows that it is likely that heavy use of LLMs causes
significant emissions exceeding that of yearly transatlantic
flights.
My analysis shows that it's nowhere near. It's more like one lifetime
of using agentic coding is equivalent to taking one transatlantic
flight in a lifetime.
Now of course this may be nonetheless too much already. Energy use
and carbon emissions of agentic coding will rise. Some of my base
figures may be wrong (but they'd have to be *very* wrong for agentic
coding to be worse than other activities we take for granted).
And I may have made a mistake in my calculations. I would welcome a
correction.
Tom
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/energy-use-of-ai-inference-efficiency-pathways-and-test-time-compute/
[2] Probably a massive overestimate (maybe by 10x?): I don't think
I've ever reached that sustained pace -- Moritz might have! -- let
alone the whole working day every day
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