Worldwide electricity used in data centers

By Jonathan Koomey. 2008

1,027 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The direct electricity used by data centers has become an important issue in recent years as demands for new Internet services (such as search, music downloads, video-on-demand, social networking, and telephony) have become more widespread. This study estimates historical electricity used by data centers worldwide and regionally on the basis of more detailed data than were available for previous assessments, including electricity used by servers, data center communications, and storage equipment. Aggregate electricity use for data centers doubled worldwide from 2000 to 2005. Three quarters of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expensive (volume) servers. Data center communications and storage equipment each contributed about 10% of the growth. Total electricity use grew at an average annual rate of 16.7% per year, with the Asia Pacific region (without Japan) being the only major world region with growth significantly exceeding that average. Direct electricity used by information technology equipment in data centers represented about 0.5% of total world electricity consumption in 2005. When electricity for cooling and power distribution is included, that figure is about 1%. Worldwide data center power demand in 2005 was equivalent (in capacity terms) to about seventeen 1000 MW power plants.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfcd71f72235f43c59680033712a1ee61624b020

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In Control and Systems Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Trends in worldwide ICT electricity consumption from 2007 to 2012 (2014, methodology): “6 (including this study) based their data center electricity use estimation on work by Koomey et al. [47,45,31].”
Advances in VCSELs for Communication and Sensing (2010, background): “to consume a substantial amount of power [51].”
Energy-Efficient Superconducting Computing—Power Budgets and Requirements (2013, background): “Data Centers worldwide number roughly 500 000 in 2011 and draw an estimated 31 GW of electric power [4]–[6].”
Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy (2019, background): “The earliest estimates of the electricity demand of data centres indicated that they used about 150 TWh, corresponding to 1% of the total global electricity use, in 2005 (Koomey 2008), and roughly 200 TWh, or 1.”
On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030 (2015, methodology): “Data center electricity usage was first studied by Koomey [139] and it has been mentioned that data centers used 1.5% of global electricity in 2010 [140].”
It's not easy being green (2012, background): “25 kW [23] in a region where the electricity cost is 11.”
A survey on virtual machine migration and server consolidation frameworks for cloud data centers (2015, background): “To scale a CDC, virtualization exploits VM migration to relocate VMs both within and across CDCs to achieve various resource management objectives like server maintenance provisioning, power reduction, load balancing, and fault tolerance (Koomey, 2008; Voorsluys et al., 2009).”