“It was in that moment that I realized that if our children look back to how we failed them, it will not have been for lack of scientific understanding or even technological prowess; it will have been due, fundamentally, to cowardice. A profound cowardice among those who actually do have
Read moreThe biggest current problem with data centers nowadays is poor capacity utilization (Shehabi et al. 2016). The most widely-cited example is that of comatose servers, in which 20-30% of servers in typical enterprise data centers are using electricity but doing nothing useful (Koomey and Taylor 2015). Beyond comatose servers, many
Read moreAt long last, the 3rd edition of Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving is out! Official publication date was October 1st, 2017 for the paperback. The eBook versions (kindle and ePub) will be released on November 1st, 2017. I first wrote this book to train young
Read moreEpisode 52 of Chris Nelder’s Energy Transition show was posted September 20, 2017, and it features yours truly talking frankly about nuclear power economics, the role of storage, 100% renewable energy scenarios, and limits of economic models, among other things. I’m pleased to say we achieved a “geek
Read moreOur previous work on trends in the efficiency of computing showed that computations per kWh at peak output doubled every 1.6 years from the mid 1940s to around the year 2000, then slowed to a doubling time of 2.6 years after 2000 (Koomey et al. 2011, Koomey and
Read moreOne of the most surprising things about the data center industry is how cavalier it is about the number of servers sitting around using electricity but doing nothing. We call such servers “comatose”, or more colorfully, “zombies”. In 2015 we did our first study of this issue using granular analysis
Read moreThe US EIA Monthly Energy Review (Table 7.2a) includes data on net generation for the US (utilities plus independent generators), and from those data we can say something interesting about what was driving declines in coal generation from 2015 to 2016. The conventional wisdom is that cheap natural gas
Read moreThe oil industry has known about the climate problem for a long time, which makes their resistance to actions to reduce emissions somewhat problematic (that’s an understatement). This video from Shell dated 1991 is exemplary in how it treats climate science, and it stands up really well. That speaks
Read morePhoto: Chris Calwell (left) and Jonathan Koomey (right) in 2010 presenting Art Rosenfeld with recognition of a new unit coined in his honor, in a peer reviewed article in Environmental Research Letters. One Rosenfeld equals savings of 3 billion kWh/year (at the meter) and reductions of 3 million metric
Read moreLast month, LBNL and NREL released an important study analyzing costs and benefits of renewable portfolio standards. This study is a comprehensive look not just at the costs of implementing renewable energy to meet those standards but the benefits that accrue from doing so. Those benefits include reduced greenhouse gas
Read moreFor the past two years I’ve been working with a distinguished team of analysts associated with the Risky Business project to analyze possible pathways to substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Our new report, From Risk to Return: Investing in a Clean Energy Economy, just came out
Read moreMy colleague Sam Naffziger (AMD) and I just published our latest article titled “Energy efficiency of computing: What’s next?” in the magazine Electronic Design. Here’s the abstract, which didn’t make it into the actual online article: Today’s computing systems operate at peak output a tiny fraction
Read moreThe sterling reputations of Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles precede them, and in The Madhouse Effectthey do not disappoint. I confess that I read all the cartoons first (I’m a big Tom Toles fan). Then I dug in to the text, and found it equally enjoyable. The writing
Read moreWe just expanded and updated the Oil-Climate Index (OCI) from the first version that we released in 2015. Project collaborators at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Stanford University, and the University of Calgary have now collected enough open-source data to model the climate impacts of 75 global oils—25
Read moreCern datacenter Photo credit: By Hugovanmeijeren (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons I’ve been struggling for years to convince executives in large enterprises to fix the incentive, reporting, and other structural problems in data centers. The folks in the data center know that
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