September 5, 2001—A new report from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers (or server farms)—which house hundreds or thousands of computers—greatly exaggerate their power requirements, in part due to overblown growth projections and a need to appear bigger and better than the competition. Using a combination of measurements and calculations, the report found that data centers use at most 50 watts per square foot, including the energy needed for cooling the room. Using an estimate of the total square footage of data centers in the United States, the report said that, at most, the centers would require 475 megawatts of power and would consume just 0.12 percent of the electricity produced in the United States.
The report is available online at the LBL Web site.
