Source: Mark Mills, an analyst with Digital Power Group, a Washington DC-based energy research firm, quoted in The waste at the heart of the web, New Scientist, 5 December 2006

 

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 As microprocessors become faster, with more and more processor units, their energy needs, and the power required to cool them, have skyrocketed. Mark Mills, an analyst with Digital Power Group, a Washington DC-based energy research firm, says computers now consume about 10 per cent of the electricity generated in the US - and that figure is set to double in the next decade.

 

Why is this happening? It's not a straightforward case of proliferating desktop PCs sucking up more power. What's at the root of the power consumption hike is a seismic shift in how we use computers, with online activity at the heart of it. As applications offering video access, music, photo storage and even word processing move the data off our desks and onto remote servers, a power-hungry beast is emerging: the data centre - sometimes called a server farm - that has to store and retrieve all your stuff.

 

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In terms of the individual user, an energy-use audit by Mills and his colleagues found that the creation, packaging, storage and movement of just 10 megabytes of data - from the making of the hardware to the running of the system that delivers it to you - requires the energy equivalent of burning 900 grams of coal.