Our article on changes in data center electricity use from 2010 to 2018, out in Science Magazine today

Our article on global data center electricity use is out today (February 28, 2020) in Science Magazine as a Policy Forum article.

The intro of the article gives context:

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Key findings:

• Total global data center electricity use increased by only 6% from 2010 to 2018, even as the number of data center compute instances (i.e. virtual machines running on physical hardware) rose to 6.5 times its 2010 level by 2018 (compute instances are a measure of computing output as defined by Cisco).

• Data center electricity use rose from 194 TWh in 2010 to 205 TWh in 2018, representing about 1% of the world’s electricity use in 2018.

• Computing service demand rose rapidly from 2010 to 2018. Installed storage capacity rose 26 fold, data center IP traffic rose 11 fold, workloads and compute instances rose six fold, and the installed base of physical servers rose 30%.

• Computing efficiency rapidly increased, mostly offsetting growth in computing service demand: PUE dropped by 25% from 2010 to 2018, server energy intensity dropped by a factor of 4, the average number of servers per workload dropped by a factor of 5, and average storage drive energy use per TB dropped by almost a factor of 10.

• Expressed as energy use per compute instance, the energy intensity of the global data center industry dropped by around 20% per year between 2010 and 2018.  This efficiency improvement rate is much greater than rates observed in other key sectors of the global economy over the same period.

• We also showed that current efficiency potentials are enough to keep electricity demand roughly constant for the next doubling of computing service demand after 2018, if policy makers and industry keep pushing efficiency in their facilities, hardware, and software.

• We offered three primary areas for policy action: (1) extend current efficiency trends by stressing efficiency standards, best practice dissemination, and financial incentives; (2) increase RD&D investments in next generation computing, storage, and heat removal technologies to deliver efficiency gains when current trends approach their limits, while incentivizing renewable power in parallel; and (3) invest in robust data collection, modeling, and monitoring.

Articles summarizing the work appeared yesterday in The New York Times, Bloomberg, USA Today, Data Center Dynamics, Wired, Quartz, IFL Science, New Scientist, and One Zero, among other outlets. Google also did a blog post describing their progress in improving data center efficiency over time.

The Northwestern University news release is here.

The UCSB news release is here.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory release is here.

The spreadsheet model used for the analysis can be downloaded here: https://zenodo.org/record/3668743#.XmF-Gi2ZPWZ

The full reference is

Masanet, Eric, Arman Shehabi, Nuoa Lei, Sarah Smith, and Jonathan Koomey. 2020. “Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates.” Science. vol. 367, no. 6481. pp. 984. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6481/984.abstract]