If you push any interesting tradeoff far enough you end up with a net loss, which I guess is what the far-out hypothetical is about. I bet, though, that we're still quite far from losing by replacing JPEG. Outside of what's already in this post, a few factors are are 1) many images are transmitted+decoded more times than they're encoded, so the wild AVIF software encoding time is less of a factor, 2) there are lighter options than AVIF (JPEG XL, notably its JPEG1 transcoder -- ~50 MP/s single-threaded for ~20% savings for me), and 3) specialized hardware is out there for AV1/AVIF and HEVC/HEIC, mostly motivated by wanting good mobile video. Given all that I tend to think folks will usually find a lazy equilibrium for image compression that's also reasonable for power consumption--you don't want software AVIF encoding for your phone's local camera roll, etc. An interesting exception could be if there's a bit of conflict of interest between the server and the consumer. Something like streaming AV1 video to a laptop with software-only decoding just to save bandwidth is right in the unsweet spot where there's a real net loss for power use (and the user--fans spinning, battery draining), but the site doesn't look broken. Unfortunately, I think the level of further uptake of new image/video formats is mostly up to Apple. They quietly joined AOMedia (they may've found the patent licenses included helpful for implementing VP8/9), but if they actually support AV1/AVIF (and/or JXL), then we will have next-gen image formats everywhere. Otherwise, new codecs probably end up like WebP and VP9 were for years, opportunistically used by folks with the resources and motivation to juggle multiple formats. I don't think we'll ever see HEIC everywhere because of patents. This had some interesting detail about power consumption in a video context: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines . It includes a brief, interesting mention of how power use of data transmission is complicated, linking to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo0PB5i_b4Y&t=2520s Also, your example of the Deep Space Network made me think of this recent post: https://twitter.com/xssfox/status/1476114977626865665 -- someone managed to send a JPEG of a photo from the middle of nowhere out over HAM radio, then looked at what they could get from an AVIF of that size. Neat to see the difference! Anyway, thanks a lot for the opportunity to nerd out about formats 🤣