The environmental cost of chat sessions and the paperless office

The rise of the paperless office, online banking, VOIP calls and e-commerce is not as green as you might think. The demand for electronic services is creating a boom in the construction of data centres to store and process these digital details on countless computer servers, and the need to keep these server farms cool and always-on is having a noticeable effect on the power grid.

According to a recent report by America's Environmental Protection Agency, America's data centres require more power than all the television sets in the 50 states, combined. Put another way, the energy consumed is equivalent to 5.8 million homes – that's a lot of Amazon orders and Skype chat sessions. Put in monetary terms, it's $4.5 billion (£2.2 billion) worth of electricity consumption per annum, says Greenbang.com.

The EPA conducted the study into America's data centres in response to a congressional inquiry. Their findings were a bit jolting. According to the EPA, the energy consumption of data centres in 2011 is expected to be nearly double that of 2000 levels, just as the dot-com boom was coming to its unceremonious implosion. In 2011, the annual electric bill will soar to $7.4 billion (£3.6 billion), says InformationWeek.

But there are already signs that the tech industry is heeding the call for greener data centres. Last week, Microsoft broke ground on a $550 million (£271 million) data centre in San Antonio that makes the most of "grey", or recycled, water. IBM too plans to invest heavily in more energy efficient data centres, earmarking $1 billion (£493 million) for the cause.

Comments

[Call Cruncher]

Interesting article. Thanks for the post.

[roycastle]

Ok so how does this compare to the overall effect on the environment by the paper industry fifteen to twenty years ago? Should we conclude that we're better off or worse?