Can #Facebook Show How to Reduce the Growing Energy Use of the Internet? | Scientific American
►http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=facebook-leadership-reduces-internet-growing-phys
There are now more than 500,000 #data_centers worldwide, hosting the bulk of the more than 32 million individual servers. Server farms, according to data center expert Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, now account for roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity use, or about 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. #Google's data centers, for example, dwarf Facebook’s, using two billion kilowatt-hours per year as the world searches for the latest article on server energy use.
That makes the #Internet a larger emitter of greenhouse gases—230 million metric tons—than all the countries of Scandinavia put together.
(...) small server rooms, or even closets, employed by smaller companies the world over, typically do not have computers with the most efficient cooling and use up to twice as much electricity per computation as the more effective computers