Burn coal, or improve your datacenter, says EPA

We're facing a choice, says the Environmental Protection Agency: build more energy efficient data centers or choke on fumes.

The EPA issued a report today that said that energy consumed by data centers in the U.S. could rise to 100 billion kilowatt hours a year in 2011, a big jump from the 61 kilowatt hours consumed by data centers last year. Without changes or improvements in efficiency, the increase will require ten additional power plants.

That 100 billion kilowatt hours will cost $7.4 billion.

Data centers aren't the largest consumers of electricity in the country. In 2006, the power chewed up by them only came to 1.5 percent of the total. (Lighting takes up around 22 percent, according to the Department of Energy.). Still, data centers last year gobbled up more electricity than all of the color TVs in the U.S. last year, or about the same as 5.8 million households.

The EPA added that adopting existing technologies-- virtualization, better power converters or cooling systems or even solar-powering data centers--could reduce the load by 25 percent with existing technologies. Several companies are coming up with tech for this market. Conceivably, power efficiency technologies could reduce electrical consumption by 55 percent in 2011. That would prevent 47 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

[ribarbora]

It's either conservation or offshoring

Google is in the process of completing a huge new data center in Iowa. Microsoft recently built a new one too, I believe. I'm sure they're not the only ones.

But if our country's power grid can't handle all these data centers, and companies will be taxed (either in the form of an actual tax, or in the form of needing to spend a lot of money to reduce their power consumption), they will probably respond to that by offshoring their data center operations.

If I were China, I'd be focusing less on selling toys with lead paint on them, and more on building out infrastructure to offer incentives to Western businesses to move their data center operations to Asia.

Data Centers will soon be "Made in China" unless we do something. But what?

[chris__anderson]

conservation is a natural evolution

efficiency will improve as data centers look to reduce costs. you are already seeing consolidations thanks to virtualization technologies like xen and vmware, higher density lower power technologies like blades and mainframes from IBM.

efficiency is the new focus for hardware manufacturers like intel and AMD thanks to the demands of companies like google. i heard that intel's core line is based on the pIII core because the P4 was too inefficient.

also, data centers will look to supplement power from the electrical grid with green power that they have generated themselves from solar, wind or some other source.

also, breaking up giant data centers into smaller nodes and distributing those nodes around the globe might reduce the need for excessively redundant systems.

[LuvThatCO2]

So build more power plants

We have so much coal in this country its rediculous, and yet the eco-fascists do everything they can to prevent us from using it.

And dont give me this choke on fumes BS. Coal plants can be very clearn - far cleaner than they were 50 years ago.

And if you dont like coal... there's always nuclear. Clean, emission-less nuclear. But alas, the eco-fascists dont like that either.

[Hoser McMoose]

Coal is always pretty dirty

It doesn't matter how well you build your plant, coal is always going to be very dirty fuel. There's just too much extra crap in there to truly make it clean. Even the so-called "Clean Coal" technologies are likely to spew quite a bit of pollution, though a lot of that will probably be in effluent dumped into lakes and rivers rather then flue gas pumped out smoke stacks.

Certainly it's possible to build cleaner power plants than what is out there now, it's truly tragic that only about 1/3rd of coal power plants have so much as scrubbers on them! However no matter how 'clean' you try to make them, they're still pretty dirty. If nothing else you should worry about this due to the economic costs of things, such as the tens or hundreds of billion dollars per year in health care costs (about half of which gets funded through personal income taxes that go to Medicare/Medicaid) that coal causes.

Nuclear, on the other hand, is an excellent solution in this regard. Wind energy is also usually economical for the first 10% of electricity needs and is the probably the safest and most environmentally friendly solution available at this time.

[lingsun]

That's a crock, we don't have to choke on fumes.

That's a crock, we don't have to choke on fumes.

[waltsjc]

Geothermal

There is enough tap-able geothermal energy under the US to power our needs 15,000 times over. We just need to use it. Building plants and generating power from geothermal sources would cost LESS than nuclear with NONE of the waste and risk. It also is less expensive than solar and works where solar doesn't. Ditto for wind power which suffers from high land use requirements, maintenance costs, and lack of consistent power generation.

No idea why most of the alternative energy people keep ignoring geothermal.

Coal? Is the EPA filled with idiots??? Apparently.