IT slurps 10 % of all electricity production

This report, sponsored by the National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, claims that IT needs 1,500 terawatt hours of energy per year - or about 10% of global electricy production. See The Cloud Begins With Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power (August 2013).

This figure is a headline grabber, but it is a slightly misleading title as the cloud isn't cloud computing. The report considers the energy cost of production of the hardware, the energy required to keep networks humming etc. However The Register notes that the report:

ignores the data centers the video is served out of, and tablet charging. 

I recall this report by the EPA in 2007 which estimated that US data centers consumed 1.5% of US electricity production, and was projected to rise to 3 percent by 2011.

There is the strong possibility of a major shift in IC power design which could radically change these figures. Cambridge-based ARM has started its foray into server chips and Interworx (who may have a bias!) think it is significant: What ARM In The Data Center Means For Hosting Companies.

The inefficiency of today's data centres

The Week (an excellent (weekly printed) aggregation of the best journalism across the globe) provides this excellent summary of a New York Times article about inefficiencies in data centres - The Cloud Factories - Power, Pollution and the Internet.

Some stats pulled from The Week:

• 30 billion Watts of electricity used by digital warehouses worldwide, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants
• 76 billion Kilowatt-hours used by data centers nationwide (ie in US) in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the United States
• 6 to 12 Percentage of electricity powering servers that perform actual tasks, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Company. "The rest were essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surf in activity that could slow or crash their operations," says the Times.
• EMC and the International Data Corporation together estimated that more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information were created globally last year.

These figures are horrifying - but why do they exist?

Simply, because there is a whole culture in the IT sector of having massive redundancy:

“You look at it [this report] and say, ‘How in the world can you run a business like that,’ Mr. Symanski (of the Electric Power Research Institute) said. The answer is often the same, he said: “They don’t get a bonus for saving on the electric bill. They get a bonus for having the data center available 99.999 percent of the time.”