Report: data centers accounted for just 1 to one.5 percent of electricity use last year, Google claims lower than 1 percent of that

You’d think, watching companies like Apple break ground on sprawling data centers, that the choice of servers powering our untethered lives was at the rise. In a distinct decade, you have got been right. But not this one. In response to a study prepared on the request of The hot York Times, the variety of servers in use has declined “significantly” since 2005. That’s mostly a result of financial crisis of 2008, says lead researcher Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University, but we also can’t discount the effect of more efficient technologies. What’s more, he says, servers worldwide consume less energy than you will have guessed: they accounted for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of world electricity use in 2010. And while Google, the king of cloud computing, have been cagey about revealing just what percentage servers house its treasure trove of knowledge, the corporate said that of that 1 to one.5 percent, it accounted for only 1 percent — meaning, only a hundredth of a percent of each of the electricity consumed last year. All told, data centers’ energy consumption has risen 56 percent since 2005 — a miles cry from the EPAs 2007 prediction that this figure would double by 2010, with annual costs ballooning to $7.4 billion. Nevertheless, this slower-than-expected growth could well be temporary. Though Koomey can’t specify to what extent the financial crisis and technological advancements are accountable, he insists, commonly, that we’re primarily seeing fallout from the commercial slowdown — a stay of execution, of varieties, for those people rooting for energy conservation.

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This post is tagged: efficient technologies, energy conservation, energy consumption, global electricity, Stanford university, technological advancements