How much energy does /lookup use?

Highland Pro’s /lookup feature uses very little energy, both in absolute numbers and in comparison to other common online activities. It’s roughly equivalent to a Google search.

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Because /lookup provides short answers to short questions, there’s not a lot of data being exchanged or processed.

Synonyms, definitions and rhymes are delivered from pre-generated tables. Because there’s no “thinking” happening, the total energy used is negligible -- significantly less than a Google search.

If you have “Allow other lookups, including LLMs” enabled in Settings > Privacy, /lookup may use external services to find an answer.

Energy costs vary between services, and are falling quickly as they become more efficient. For early 2025, best estimates would appear to be between 1,000 and 2,000 joules per answer, given the small number of tokens being used compared to ChatGPT or similar systems. Highland Pro’s /lookup has essentially no “context window” — there’s no additional data being exchanged or processed with each query.

These energy requirements are already low, and will likely fall significantly lower as new technologies come online, including on-device processing.

In every day terms

For simplicity, let’s assume the high end of 2,000 joules for a single Highland Pro /lookup. We can then compare that amount to other common daily activities.

With 2,000 joules of electricity, you could:

Use a desktop computer for 20 seconds.
Stream two minutes of Netflix on your phone.
Stream ten minutes of music on Spotify.
Scroll Instagram for 16 minutes.
Play 8-10 seconds on Xbox or PlayStation.
Microwave something for 1.6 seconds.
Ride an electric scooter 200 meters.
Drive an electric car 11 meters.
Run a refrigerator for 13.3 seconds.
Use a hair dryer for 1 second.

In short, Highland Pro’s /lookup uses significantly less energy than many things we do all the time without noticing.