2 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL
www.datacenterjournal.com
FEATURE
Data Center
Energy:
Out of
Control?
In the new millennium's first decade, data center energy
consumption in the U.S. grew quickly and seemed to be
approaching an exponential rate of increase. Naturally, the result
for years afterward has been hand-wringing over the implications;
one example is the widely known New York Times article titled
"Power, Pollution and the Internet." Exponential curves can be
scary things. Take world population, for instance: the number of
people on the planet took off in the twentieth century, leading to
dire predictions of resource shortages, mass starvation and worse.
Prophets of population doom such as Paul Ehrlich (author of The
Population Bomb) practically became household names.
BY JEFFREY R CLARK
