Data Centers Are Becoming Big Polluters, Study Finds
The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.
Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is “not yet counted and likely to be very significant,” said William Forrest, the lead McKinsey consultant on the report.
The study, released on Wednesday at the Green Enterprise Computing Symposium in Orlando, Fla., mainly focuses on the cost- and energy-saving opportunities being squandered today in corporate and government data centers.
For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance. In other words, if data centers were hotels, they would be bankrupt and shut down instead of growing like kudzu.
Full Article: NYTimes
In my experience, server power need is grossly over estimated. Many times powerful servers are ordered up when less powerful ones or even virtual private servers (VPS) will suffice. I think to combat the problem, people are going to realize that most of the time they don’t need an entire server for their project. Virtualization would vastly help this problem as well as tapping into alternative energy sources that do not contribute to global climate change. As we become a more digital society we need to look into ways to conserve energy will meeting our increasing demands for server access.