Photo Credit: University of Hertfordshire, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported license. Many of you know that I’ve been teaching an online class about data transformation for a couple of years now. That class, now titled Modernizing Enterprise Data Centers for Fun and Profit, is
Read moreMother Jones has a terrific piece describing the economics of doing big stories like the influential muckraking piece they did on private prisons. That story lead to dramatic results: This June, we published a big story—Shane Bauer’s account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private
Read moreI had a wide ranging conversation with Chris Nelder that he recorded for his Energy Transitions podcast series, posted today. We covered a lot of ground, as the description reveals: Should we tweak our markets to keep nuclear plants alive, or forget about markets and pay for them another way…
Read moreThe Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society just released the 2015 state of the climate. Download it here. NOAA gives a nice summary, which I condense to its key points below. 1. Greenhouse gases were the highest on record. 2. Global surface temperature was the highest on record. 3. Sea
Read moreLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with experts at Stanford (me), Carnegie Mellon, and Northwestern, today released our latest analysis of electricity used by data centers in the US. Surprisingly, electricity use in data centers has been roughly flat since the financial crisis with little growth projected to 2020, even
Read moreYour climate thought for today, via Goodreads: “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion.
Read moreGraph of energy and electricity/GDP indices taken from Hirsh and Koomey 2015 (subscription required). The graphs illustrate structural changes in the relationship between energy and economic activity that have confounded modelers in the past and will no doubt do so in the future. Today I gave a webinar for
Read moreA very old phone, at the Point Sur lighthouse in California. Photo taken in late March 2016. We’ve come a long way!
Read moreIn September 2015, Data Center Dynamics published my article titled “Modernizing enterprise data centers for fun and profit”, which describes the rationale for my upcoming online class. The current incarnation of that class starts again May 2, 2016. Here are the opening paragraphs of the DCD article: Twenty first century
Read moreOur article critiquing the recent Lovering et al. Energy Policy article on the costs of nuclear power was just published online by Energy Policy (the article is now considered to be “in press” with only minor tweaks to come once they assign the article to an issue). My colleagues Nate
Read morejgkoomey: Cern 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
Read moreThe following is a joint post from Danny Cullenward and Jonathan G. Koomey. ______________________________________________________________ Image Credit: Michael Maggs CC BY-SA 3.0 File:Bouncing ball strobe edit.jpg Created: 29 September 2007 More excuses from the Breakthrough Institute on data quality Dr. Harry Saunders, a Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute,
Read moreMy friend Fred Stein at SRI alerted me to this upcoming event. I’m not able to make it, but I encourage others to attend. If you do go, please let me know what you learned! Smart Buildings: Silicon Valley Delivers Data-Driven Office Space Date/Time Date - Tue Feb
Read morePhoto credit: Jonathan Koomey, taken at Stanford University, October 14, 2015. Data Center Knowledge published my essay today titled “The three pillars of modern data center operations”. Here the intro: Modern enterprise data centers are some of the most technically sophisticated business activities on earth. Ironically enough, they are also
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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