The number one single Despacito has had over five billion streams online, which is equivalent to the amount of energy used by five African countries over an entire year.

With the internet using a larger proportion of the world’s energy than ever, film and TV writer Beth Webb investigates how streaming is contributing towards climate change, and explores if renewable energy could help make streaming habits greener.

Much of the internet lives in data centres in Virginia. Beth visits a hyper-scale data centre that is over one million square feet in size. Everything imaginable is stored inside these buildings: viral videos, pornography, doctors’ notes and even bank account details. For people to access this material whenever they need it, these data centres need to be kept switched on 24 hours a day – which means constant energy use.

Every time a video is played, data has to physically travel from these data centres to our devices, often in cables under the sea and alongside roads. Sending the data shooting around the world also uses huge amounts of energy.

The main energy supplier in Virginia, Dominion Energy, has a monopoly over electricity generation in the state, and they still source most of their energy from fossil fuels. Beth visits one of the company’s enormous coal-burning plants, Mount Storm, to see first-hand exactly what it takes to put endless slime videos on people’s screens.

Amazon and other Silicon Valley giants have pledged to use fully renewable energy to power their data centres, with Google and Apple saying they have already achieved this. But with the world’s internet use growing exponentially year after year, is there enough renewable energy to keep up with demand?

March 5 2020 on BBC Three