Data Center Electricity Bills Double
The energy consumed by data center servers, cooling equipment, and related infrastructure more than doubled in the United States and worldwide between 2000 and 2005, according to a new study.
A jump in the number of servers—especially lower-end servers costing less than $25,000—accounts for 90% of the additional power consumption, says the study’s author, Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University and a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The study was commissioned by Advanced Micro Devices, which is touting its energy-efficient processors. Only 5% to 8% of the increase in data center electricity consumption is attributed to power use per unit.
Driving the server proliferation is the insatiable appetite for Web content, such as video on demand, music downloads, and Internet telephony, Koomey says.
The total electricity bill to operate data center servers and related infrastructure equipment in the United States was $2.7 billion in 2005, compared with $1.3 billion in 2000. Worldwide, the total bill was $7.2 billion in 2005, compared with $3.2 billion in 2000.
Looked at differently, U.S. data center power consumption in 2005 was equivalent to about five 1,000- megawatt power plants, or five typical nuclear or coal power plants, Koomey says.