Data Centers: Good News on Energy

As the number of data centers continues to increase in the United States, the good news is that they are becoming much more energy efficient. A new report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that electricity consumption by data centers nationwide, after rising rapidly for more than a decade, started to plateau in 2010 and has remained steady since, at just under 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.

Furthermore, electricity consumption is projected to maintain a low growth rate through 2020, while the total server installed base is projected to increase by 40 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to the report titled "United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, the first comprehensive energy analysis of data centers in nearly 10 years.

The last such comprehensive analysis was done in 2008, a report to congress that also was conducted by Berkeley. It found that electricity use by data centers was doubling every five years, due largely to explosive growth in both the number and density of data centers.

Overall, researchers found that the larger data centers have made significant advances in operating more efficiently. At the same time, smaller data centers, which are not increasing in number but are still projected to account for 60 percent of all data center energy use in 2020, are still often inefficient.

Read more here.

This Quick Read was submitted by Dan Hounsell, editor-in-chief of Facility Maintenance Decisions, dan.hounsell@tradepressmedia.com. Read more about proper maintenance of data centers at https://www.facilitiesnet.com14202FMD.

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