Netflix's energy consumption nearly doubled in 2019

Netflix just released its latest Environmental Social Governance (ESG) report and it reveals the company's energy use has almost doubled.

As Variety reports, the latest Netflix ESG shows total energy consumption has increased by 84 percent compared to 2018. Netflix explains that its energy use is monitored in two forms. The first is the energy used to run the Netflix operation, and the second is the energy used to stream content across a global network to each subscriber.

For 2018, Netflix's operations used 51,000 megawatt hours where as serving content used 194,000 megawatt hours, for a total of 245,000 megawatt hours. Last year, operations energy usage increased to 94,000 megawatt hours while serving content required 357,000 megawatt hours, for a total of 451,000 megawatt hours.

The huge increase comes as Netflix continues to expand its subscriber base, which was up 20 percent to 167 million last year. That's clearly not keeping up with the increase in energy consumption, but then Netflix is offsetting its use with regional renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets. All of the company's non-renewable power use is matched in this way and in the process it supports renewable energy projects in 20 countries and 15 US states.

Netflix also realizes how much air travel impacts the environment, but as the travel by employees is necessary, the company offsets the greenhouse gas emissions for "the majority of this air travel" through investment in emission reduction projects.