Several companies are taking the necessary steps to reduce the carbon footprints of their data centers
Cooling servers and other computer equipment account for nearly 40 percent the energy consumed by data centers, according to a recent paper by Emerson Network Power.
Now such companies as KPMG and eBay are looking to convert the exhaust heat from this process into energy, and in doing so, reduce their electricity costs and energy footprints. They are using different me[thods that lead to a similar result: greater energy self-sufficiency.
Data centers — large groups of networked computer servers used for the remote storage, processing and distribution of large amounts of data — are energy gluttons. They’re responsible for more than 2 percent of electricity usage in the United States, according to a report by Villanova University. Another study by The New York Times found that data centers use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear plants.
“For every watt of computer power consumed by a data center, it takes another watt to cool it,” says Dennis Symanski, senior technical leader and data center expert at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
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