Report: Green Data Centers Could Save Billions, Help Planet

photo: wirenine
Time to put server-farm hogs on a diet of greens. Left unchecked, data centers could double their energy consumption over the next five years at a cost of $7.4 billion annually, according to a report issued today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By 2011, the equivalent of 10 new power plants would be needed to supply 12 gigawatts of electricity unless the energy efficiency of data centers can be improved. That's bad news for the corporate bottom line and the environment. It's also a hit on taxpayers' wallets: federal government data centers alone consume about 10 percent of that electricity.

The good news, says EPA's researchers, is that greening the data center through consolidating servers, energy-efficient equipment and tapping alternative energy sources could cut annual electricity costs by $1.6 billion to $5.1 billion by 2011 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 47 million metric tons a year.

A tech industry consortium called the Green Grid is working to ramp up data center energy efficiency as is the Climate Savers Computing Initiative led by Intel (INTC) and Google (GOOG). But the EPA report called for federal leadership to spur such measures, including working with industry to establish standardized performance standards for data centers, establishing energy efficiency standards for government contracts with data centers, and investigating whether Energy Star efficiency standards should be applied to servers and other data center equipment. State and local governments, say researchers, should consider requiring separate utility meters at large data centers while utilities could offer financial incentives for energy efficient data centers. Some utilities, like California's PG&E (PCG), already provide such programs.

The push to make data centers more environmentally friendly is a boon to companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has focused on energy-efficient chips, as well as data storage companies like Network Appliance (NTAP) and virtualization software makers such as VMware (EMC).