Electrical Consumption could Overload the Internet by 2010

A recent study by Nemertes Research says that continually rising consumer and corporate use on the internet could lead to brownouts by 2010. Data centers, with large numbers of server computers, use electricity for powering computers, lighting and cooling and heating systems.
Data centers are used extensively by a broad range of industries. They include the following, as estimated by Nemertes:

• Healthcare – 20%
• Financial Services (retail, investment banking and insurance) – 15%
• Manufacturing – 10 %

None of the other industrial sectors accounted for more than 10% of the total. However, these sectors alone amount to almost half of the total data center use.

The organizations represented in the Nemertes study were mid to large size companies with annual revenues exceeding $100 million. The study notes;

“Just over 50% have revenues less than $1 billion, while 21% have revenues that exceed $10 billion. The median annual revenue of benchmark participants is $847 million with a mean of $5.02 billion.”

Two thirds of the companies in the study had between 1,000 and 100,000 employees. The mean was approximately 23,000 employees.

The United States currently accounts for about 40% of the world’s server power usage. However, the Asia Pacific region’s global use is expected to grow from 10 to 16 percent by 2010. Servers accounted for 0.8 percent of the world’s electricity sales and 1.2 percent of United States electrical use in 2005. An AMD study predicted that global server power consumption will increase by 10,000 megawatts between 2005 and 2010. By contrast the average home uses 12 KW or 0.12 MW.

In the United States, the total data center electricity consumption was 45 billion kWh in 2005. This included servers, cooling and auxiliary equipment, and the total utility bills amounted to $2.7 billion.

According to the Nemertes study;

“In order to avoid reaching this capacity, backbone providers need to invest up to $137 billion in new capacity, which is more than double what service providers currently plan to invest.”

This all comes at a time when oil is hovering at an all time high of $100 per barrel. Energy prices are escalating rapidly and the world is consuming energy at an ever increasing rate.

These computer data centers are the backbone of the internet. Without them, worldwide communications and commerce would be crippled and economies would be shattered. America and the global community needs to take energy demand and use much more seriously to avoid an energy crisis in the next few years.

Sincerely
H. Court Young
Geologist, author & publisher
Promoting awareness through the written word
http://www.hcourtyoung.com

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