It’s hardly a secret that there is a serious demand for saving power in data centers. In a recent Times Magazine article:
Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.
To put that in a little more perspective, the 2009 census for Sweden puts the population at 9,263,872. Sweden’s population is just slightly higher than New York City (8,274,527 in 2007) or the state of New Jersey (8,682,661 estimate in 2008). Granted Sweden’s population density is 20.6/km2 compared to New York City’s 10,482/km2 or New Jersey’s 438/km2. Population density is important since that says a lot about energy consumption. Dense populations require less energy thanks to communal resources. I still suspect the average Swede uses less electricity than the average American anyway. All these numbers were pulled from Wikipedia.
The US Department of Energy does have data on power consumption and capacity as well as forecasts on consumption and production. The obvious downside in the data is the reliance on coal, oil and gas which have environmental impacts as well as political impacts and costs (we know about the instabilities of the oil market). This is why companies with lots of servers like Google are looking very carefully at power generation alternatives such as hydroelectric and solar.
We all benefit from data center efficiency. Lower cost computing is a big advantage to startups and encourages more innovation by removing price barriers. It’s also an advantage to the general public since the technology and tricks learned eventually trickle down to consumers. We already are seeing more efficient power supplies, some even beating the original 80 PLUS certification.
Perhaps if we started tracking “performance per watt” in addition to “watts per square foot” we’d be looking at things from a more sustainable perspective.
Data center capacity and consumption is pretty interesting when you look at all the variables involved. Growth, power costs, facility size, technology available, even foreign politics play a role in what it costs to operate.
