While I was visiting some of our customers last week I ran into a few that were actually told they could not use any more power by their Colo’s and their power companies. Coincidentally computerworld also noticed there is a problem. I have not seen any mention of how many BTU’s are saved because our lives are more efficient because we can work remotely now, I wonder what the trade off is between working at home, shopping from home and commuting to work and driving to the shopping mall?

Economic growth is going to require power. We are going to need more electrical power to run our infrastructures that is certain, are we going to build generating stations and power them with fossil fuel or nuclear power? Probably both.

Storage density can save a small amount of power in data centers and so that is what our customers in the situation are looking at. Below is an excerpt of the article.

February 15, 2007 (Computerworld) — Estimated electricity consumption by servers in the U.S. doubled from 2000 to 2005, when the systems consumed as much power as every single color TV in the country or all the electric devices used in the state of Mississippi — take your pick.

The growth in power use is due to increases in the number of servers being installed and stacked in data centers as demand for computer services accelerates, according to a paper written by Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has been advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on energy issues related to data centers.

Using server growth figures based on data from market-research firm IDC, Koomey estimated the amount of power consumed annually by servers and associated equipment, such as cooling systems and uninterruptible power supplies. Those technologies consumed 45 billion kilowatt hours nationwide in 2005, he wrote in his paper, which was funded by a grant from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Koomey expects power consumption to rise by another 75% by 2010. But he said in an interview yesterday that forecasting consumption is a little harder because it’s unknown how much demand for new computing services, such as a YouTube, will affect electricity use.

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Some folks just don’t care about their energy usage.