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UPDATED 1 Sept: The EI library in London is temporarily closed to the public, as a precautionary measure in light of the ongoing COVID-19 situation. The Knowledge Service will still be answering email queries via email , or via live chats during working hours (09:15-17:00 GMT). Our e-library is always open for members here: eLibrary , for full-text access to over 200 e-books and millions of articles. Thank you for your patience.
Efficiency measures in US data centres could save $3bn per year
Much of the energy used by the US’ data centres is being wasted by running computer servers that do little or no work most of the time, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The study finds that improved energy efficiency practices could cut energy waste by at least 40% at data centres, saving over $3bn annually.
‘Most of the attention is focused on the highly visible hyperscale ‘cloud’ data centres like Google’s and Facebook’s, but they already are very efficient and represent less than 5% of US data centre electricity consumption,’ said Pierre Delforge, NRDC Director of High-tech Energy Efficiency. ‘Our small, medium, corporate, and multi-tenant data centres are still squandering huge amounts of energy.’
The report, Scaling Up Energy Efficiency Across the Data Center Industry: Evaluating Key Drivers and Barriers notes that while huge cloud server farms have made significant efficiency improvements, progress has been much slower and uneven across the nearly 3mn other data centres in businesses and organisations that house 95% of servers across the US.
According to the report, up to one-third of servers are no longer needed but are still consuming large amounts of electricity, and many others are underutilised. It finds that up to 30% of servers are ‘comatose’ and no longer needed because projects have ended or business processes changed, but are still plugged in and consuming electricity. In a lot of firms the company managing the data centre is different to that paying for the power, creating split incentives.
US data centres used an estimated 91bn kWh of electricity in 2013 – enough to power all of New York City’s households twice. By 2020, annual data centre energy consumption is expected to reach 140bn kWh in the US – equivalent to that generated by 50 large coal-fired power plants.
News Item details
Journal title: Energy World
Countries: USA -
Subjects: Energy efficiency, Power stations, Coal fired power stations
