Nnews
Society | DOI: 10.1145/1400181.1400186
Patrick Kurp
Green computing
Are you ready for a personal energy meter?
ANDY HOOPER INSISTS he’s
not a utopian, but his vision of the future of computing shares some resemblances with the dreams of
science-fiction writers.
He foresees a not-too-distant time
when the world’s sources of computing power are concentrated in remote
server warehouses strategically located
near the sources of renewable energy
that power them, such as wind and solar
farms. And the usage of the power sources could shift across the globe, depending on where energy is most abundant.
“The system we now employ is hugely wasteful,” says Hopper, a professor of
computer technology at the University
of Cambridge and head of its Computer
Laboratory. “We lose energy by relying
on the national grid. I propose a system
that is more efficient, much less expensive, and that would have an immediate
impact on the world’s energy consumption. It’s always cheaper to move data
than energy.”
PHO TOGRAPH COURTESY OF GOOGLE
Hopper is among the more conspicuous and outspoken pioneers in the
green computing movement—a multifaceted, global effort to reduce energy
consumption and promote sustainability. Proposed and existing strategies
range from the practical to the fanciful,
and include government regulations,
industry initiatives, environmentally
friendly computers made of recyclable
materials, and Hopper’s suggestion of a
personal energy meter.
Much of the green computing movement’s focus today is on data centers,
which have been lambasted as “the
SUVs of the tech world” for their enormous and wasteful consumption of
electricity. The approximately 6,000
data centers in the United States, for
instance, consumed roughly 61 billion
kilowatt-hours (k Wh) of energy in 2006,
according to Lewis Curtis, a strategic infrastructure architect at Microsoft. The
total cost of that energy, $4.5 billion,
was more than the cost of electricity
used by all the color televisions in the
U.S. in 2006, Curtis says.
The Department of Energy (DOE) reports that data centers consumed 1.5%
of all electricity in the U.S. in 2006, and
their power demand is growing 12% a
year. If data centers’ present rate of consumption continues, Curtis warns, they
will consume about 100 billion k Wh of
energy at an annual cost of $7.4 billion
by 2011.
The federal government wants data
centers’ energy consumption to be reduced by at least 10% by 2011. That translates into an energy savings equivalent
to the electricity consumed by a million
average U.S. households, according to
Paul Sheathing, a spokesman for DOE’s
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
