Data Centers Are No Longer The Energy Hogs They Once Were
Fortune, June 27, 2016
Efforts by some of the world’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon to reduce the amount of energy their data centers consume is now bearing fruit.
According to a new report released on Monday from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the number of data centers has grown rapidly over the past several years to power our connected devices and always-on lifestyles. But the energy needed to support that growth has actually been flat.
[bctt tweet=”A @LBNLcs report predicts data center energy use will grow 4% between 2014 & 2020.” username=”ZonditsEE”]
The result of these types of efforts is that U.S. data centers consumed 70 billion kilowatt hours in 2014, or about 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption in that year, the report found. That’s about the same as data centers consumed in 2010.
The energy use by data centers only grew 4% between 2010 and 2014. In contrast it grew 90% from 2000 to 2005, and 24% from 2005 to 2010. The report predicts that data center energy use will only grow another 4% between 2014 and 2020.