to help cool data centers, and the International Energy Agency reports these buildings – filled with computer hardware – are using 200 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. A terawatt-hour is equal to 10 raised to the power of 12 watthours, or 1 million megawatt-hours. “I think, more and more, customers are going to have questions about whether what [agents] are selling is energy efficient,” said Bunger. “Customers are going to be looking for the tradeoff where they can get more compute for every energy watt.” In other words, “the customer may be seeing a service that uses less power, and the agent is going to have to consider this,” Bunger continued He added that vendors are becoming more transparent with environmental profiles or “spec sheets” that provide information regarding how much carbon fuel is used to operate equipment and how much is used for transportation, etc. “This is what customers want to know, more and more, so agents are getting pushed to know and provide this information,” said Bunger. U.S. lags behind While the United States houses most data center – more than 2,700, reports 8 Billion Trees – the nation lags behind efforts internationally to address the carbon-footprint problem. However, “We’re getting closer every year to building data centers that can operate without carbon fuel, but we aren’t there yet,” Bunger said. “Europe, in general, has been more progressive in regard to energy efficiency and sustainability, so they tend to adopt a few more aggressive targets, and municipalities tend to take up more actions. How Much Energy Do Data Centers Consume? Data centers are power guzzlers. In the United States, data centers consume 200 TWh (terawatt hours) annually and dump 0.3 percent of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. That is more energy consumption and CO2 emission than some nation-states. When networked devices such as tablets, laptops and smartphones are factored in, the total rises to 400 TWh and 2 percent of global CO2 emissions. The electricity used by data centers is high because the energy requirements of critical pieces of IT are vast. These include: • Lights • Cooling • Servers • Monitors • Network • Storage Drives Each of these variables needs electricity and can sometimes increase overall CO2 emissions. Source: 8Billion Trees Source: Info-Tech Research Group Number of Data Centers Worldwide Source: 8Billion Trees 3000 2701 487 U.S. Germany UK China Canada Australia Netherlands France Japan Russia Mexico Brazil India Poland Italy 456 443 328 287 281 264 207 172 153 150 138 136 131 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 Cumulative Power System ‘Embodied’ Carbon Profile Over Time Source: Schneider Electric; Energy Management Research Center; shows the cumulative power system embodied carbon broken out by equipment as a value and percentage respectively over time. (a) Broken out by equipment as value (b) Broken out by equipment as percentage 0 1 5 10 Year 15 20 1 5 10 Year 15 20 200 400 600 800 1,000 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Carbon emissions (t CO2e) MV/LV transformer (30) UPS (12) Generator (20) VRLA battery (4) LV switchgear (20) Critical power distribution (20) 130 35 107 212 51 73 130 70 107 212 51 73 130 105 107 212 51 73 130 140 214 212 51 73 130 176 214 212 51 73 21% 6% 18% 35% 8% 12% 20% 11% 17% 33% 8% 11% 19% 16% 16% 31% 7% 11% 16% 17% 26% 26% 6% 9% 15% 21% 25% 25% 6% 8% 55 JULY - AUGUST 2023 | CHANNELVISION
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