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EPA Sends Data Center Power Study to Congress

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the turns-out-we-use-a-lot-of-juice dept.

BDPrime writes "We've all been hearing ad nauseum about power and cooling issues in the data center. Now the EPA has issued a final report to Congress detailing the problem and what might be done to fix it. Most likely what will happen is the EPA will add servers and data centers into its Energy Star program. If you don't feel like reading the entire 133-page report, the 14-page executive summary is a little easier to get through."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. wow by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    n 2006, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, which accounted for about 1.5% of the total electricity consumed in the U.S. that year.

    Is that it? Seems like small potatoes to me.
    --
    The game.
    1. Re:wow by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's an estimated 11,000,000 servers in everything from 2 server closets to thousand server enterprise centers. These 11 million systems consume more power than all the TV sets in the US combined, and there are more TV sets in the US today than people.

      Or lets do it this way. Hoover Dam at peak output produces 2 Gigawatts of power per hour. 11 million servers consume 61 billion KW hours annually. It takes Hoover Dam 30,000 hours (about 3.5 years) to produce that much power. So you need four Hoover Dams just to power all the data centers in the US.

      --
      The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
  2. Re:Simple Solution by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative

    If a few large datacenters declared their fees as a small $$ value for each unit of space, and additionally a few dollars, per watt of power consumption, you'd see the problem naturally fix itself, through normal economic forces
    How on earth do you track individual power consumption? Putting a meter on each system is hardly practical. I suppose you get away with one on each rack, but many customers (the vast majority in the one data center I worked in) don't rent whole racks.