Data Center Handbook, 2nd Edition

3ENERGY AND SUSTAINABILITY IN DATA CENTERS

Bill Kosik

DNV Energy Services USA Inc., Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In 1999, Forbes published a seminal article co‐authored by Peter Huber and Mark Mills. It had a wonderful tongue‐in‐cheek title: “Dig More Coal—the PCs Are Coming.” The premise of the article was to challenge the idea that the Internet would actually reduce overall energy use in the United States, especially in sectors such as transportation, banking, and healthcare where electronic data storage, retrieval, and transaction processing were becoming integral to business operations. The opening paragraph, somewhat prophetic, reads:

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EDISON, meet Amazon.com. Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on‐line. The current fuel‐economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy‐intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.

These words, although written more than two decades ago, are still meaningful today. Clearly Mills was trying to demonstrate that a great deal of electricity is used by servers, networking gear, and storage devices residing in large data centers that also consume energy for cooling and powering ITE (information technology equipment) systems. As the data center industry matures with ...