Photo: Wind Farm
Background
Background
Energy Now
Fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) currently supply 85% of the nation’s energy needs, a significant portion of which is burned to generate electricity at a huge cost in both dollar and environmental terms. With oil imports alone costing the country roughly $1 billion a day at current prices, innovative solutions that tackle both the environmental downside of fossil fuel use while reducing our dependence on foreign energy are vital to this country’s strategic and social needs.
The U.S. wind industry installed over 1,600 MW of new wind capacity in the third quarter of the year, bringing the wind power capacity installed so far in 2009 to over 5,800 MW and the total installed capacity in the U.S. to over 31,100 MW overall. Over 5,000 MW more are under construction for completion this year or next year.
Who is consuming all this energy?
The fastest growing sector and a very significant consumer of power are data centers like those operated by Google, Microsoft and a myriad other organizations around the world. Alone, data centers account for 1% - 1.5% of global electricity consumption. A 2007 EPA report to congress(1) noted that :
- In 2006, the energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers is estimated to have been about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) - the equivalent of 1.5 percent of total US electricity consumption – and roughly double the total kilowatt-hours generated by wind in the US.
- This is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households (or about five percent of the total housing stock).
- Federal servers and data centers alone accounted for approximately 6 billion kWh (10 percent) of this electricity use, for a total electricity cost of about $450 million annually.
Extrapolating forwards to 2010 should see an increase of 40% in the amount of power needed to run the world’s data center servers. In the United States, that represents a 14 percent annual growth in electrical use, worldwide use increases by about 16 percent every year.
1 EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, August 2, 2007
