Data centres can contribute to protecting the climate and cutting costs
Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) can cut resource consumption and thus protect the climate: through the intelligent control of electricity grids, vehicles or buildings, or by making transport superfluous through teleworking, telephone and video conferences. As Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said: "Energy-efficient technologies available today allow us to avoid a total of 15.3 million tonnes of CO² by 2013." In particular, servers and data centres offer major saving potential. If this is exploited it helps both the environment and budgets. A new brochure by the Federal Environment Ministry shows that for example the operators of data centres could save a total of 3.6 billion euro of electricity costs in the coming years.
The Federal Environment Ministry itself has taken such modernisation actions to reduce the electricity consumption of its data centre by around 60 per cent (70,000 kWh). This equals a cut in CO² emissions of about 44 tonnes.
The Borderstep Institute has calculated that the energy consumption of servers and data centres in Germany has more than doubled since 2000. In 2008 it amounted to 10.1 terawatt-hours (TWh), which equals the amount of electricity generated by four medium-sized coal-fired power stations. The related electricity costs amounted to approximately 1.1 billion euro. The potential for savings is tremendous compared to this. The respective chain of savings starts with the software, continues via the hardware and electricity supply up to facility planning and cooling. The brochure contains exemplary examples of energy efficiency increases in server and data centres from Europe, the USA and Asia to demonstrate to IT managers and data centre operators how the saving potential can be tapped in practice. These topics will also be discussed on 5 March 2009 at the CeBIT exhibition in Hanover during the "Green IT World" which will take place in the framework of the 3rd Annual Conference by the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM), the Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) and the Federal Environment Agency (UBA). Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Martin Jetter, member of the presiding committee of BITKOM, will discuss the challenges and opportunities of green IT to increase energy and resource efficiency under the heading "Sustainability in a digital world - from the potential to its realisation".