Computers adding to global warming

Greenhouse gases produced by big computer warehouses, including those powering the Internet, threaten to overtake those by the airline industry by year 2012-2015, adding significantly to global warming/climate change. The best energy management practices demand data centre energy efficiency and sustained interface between the IT professionals and energy management professionals, according to Mr S. Kumar Deepa, a member of the Society of Energy Engineers and Managers (SEEM) and an Energy Technologist at the Energy Management Centre, Kerala. Computer data centres, the vast collection of computers that power everything from online banking to data entry operations, consume an incredible amount of energy. Each of those large cabinets standing tall in these centres represent a rack of processing power, which generates a lot of heat. This heat is sought to be controlled by air-conditioning, which in turn involves use of huge amounts of energy. On an average, every kWh of electricity used for processing IT loads translates into another kWh of electricity for the supporting physical infrastructure such as UPS (uninterrupted power supplies), PDUs (power distribution units), chillers, air handlers, pumps and other devices. Power demand in 2005 (including for additional infrastructure) was equivalent in capacity terms to about five 1,000 MW power plants for the US and 14 such plants for the rest of the world. Total electricity bills for operating these servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 bn and $7.2 bn for the US and the world respectively, Mr Kumar Deepa says. Reports suggest that the energy consumed by data centre servers and related infrastructure equipment worldwide has doubled between 2000 and 2005. Energy managers need to create a strategic road map for reducing energy consumption in data centres and IT firms. Data centres are a relatively easy target due to the very high density of energy consumption and ease of measurement in comparison to other, possibly more significant areas of IT energy use. Policy makers have identified IT and specifically data centre energy use as one of the fastest rising sectors. The flaring of energy prices in the recent past had one unintended but salutary impact on data centre managers – it substantially impacted their business models and triggered changes in the way data centre capacity is charged for commercially. The use of best energy management practices and the best available technology to process digital information, such as energy efficient computer servers and visualisation server software apart from removing the heat rejected from the data centre equipment in an energy efficient manner, provides an opportunity to improve data centre energy efficiency significantly. Environmental impact of data centres has become a significant issue for both operators and policy makers. Data centre operators are now grappling with the issues of energy security, costs and energy availability like never before. This is especially so given the pressures of fossil fuel availability, generation and distribution capacity and uncertainties surrounding the environmental energy policy.

The Hindu, 30th   March 2009