Green Wombat

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Want to help stop global warming? Kill your web TV. An authoritative study released today on the power consumption of servers – those high-powered computers that run the Internet, deliver millions of YouTube videos and keep the post-industrial economy humming – found that their electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005 and could spike another 75 percent by 2010. To put it another way, in 2005 it took the equivalent of 14, 1,000-megawatt power plants to keep online the world’s data centers owned by Internet giants like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). Server farms in the United States alone consumed enough electricity to keep five of those monster power plants running around the clock. And that was before the explosion of online video and the use of the Internet as a global telephone service. "You can imagine there be will be substantial improvements in the operation of data centers in the next five years, but you can also can imagine there will many new applications coming out leading to demand for servers we didn’t expect," study author and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey told Green Wombat. (Download his report here.) In the study funded by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) – which sells energy-efficient server chips – Koomey used server sales data supplied by market research firm IDC to estimate the computers’ worldwide power use. He found that by 2005 server farms consumed 1.2 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. The utility bill: $2.7 billion.

The X factor in the server power equation is Google. The search behemoth custom-builds most of its servers from off the shelf parts. That means its data centers don’t appear on IDC’s map.  So Koomey relied on a 2006 New York Times report that
estimated that Google operates 450,000 servers. That would increase the number of servers worldwide by 1.7 percent. "I don’t think the Google factor is that important for this study," says Koomey. The future may be another matter, however. With its acquisition of YouTube, which serves up hundreds of millions of videos, and its pursuit of such initiatives as digitalizing university libraries, there’s no end in sight to Google’s data center building boom. (photo at right by skreuzer.)

The report is sure to intensify efforts by AMD, Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to claim the green ground as the purveyors of energy efficient technology.

"As energy prices continue to go up, the more power efficient you can make systems, the more valuable they become to customers," says AMD executive John Fruehe. "The fact that energy costs continue to go up and demand continues to go up means they have to do something. If they’re not addressing power consumption in the data center, they’re putting their company at a competitive disadvantage."

The report also should grab the attenton of utility companies under
pressure to boost energy efficiency and increase their use of renewable energy as states like California impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions. California’s PG&E (PCG), for instance, offers financial incentives to companies that reduce the number of servers in their data centers by using virutalization technology, which allows a single server to run multiple applications at the same time.