Green Computing. Are you ready for a personal energy meter?

Patrick Kurp

Andy Hooper insists he’s not a utopian, but his vision of the future of computing shares some resemblances with the dreams of science-fiction writers.

He foresees a not-too-distant time when the world’s sources of computing power are concentrated in remote server warehouses strategically located near the sources of renewable energy that power them, such as wind and solar farms. And the usage of the power sources could shift across the globe, depending on where energy is most abundant.

“The system we now employ is hugely wasteful,” says Hopper, a professor of computer technology at the University of Cambridge and head of its Computer Laboratory. “We lose energy by relying on the national grid. I propose a system that is more efficient, much less expensive, and that would have an immediate impact on the world’s energy consumption. It’s always cheaper to move data than energy.”

Hopper is among the more conspicuous and outspoken pioneers in the green computing movement—a multifaceted, global effort to reduce energy consumption and promote sustainability. Proposed and existing strategies range from the practical to the fanciful, and include government regulations, industry initiatives, environmentally friendly computers made of recyclable materials, and Hopper’s suggestion of a personal energy meter.

Much of the green computing movement’s focus today is on data centers, which have been lambasted as “the SUVs of the tech world” for their enormous and wasteful consumption of electricity. The approximately 6,000 data centers in the United States, for instance, consumed roughly 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy in 2006, according to Lewis Curtis, a strategic infrastructure architect at Microsoft. The total cost of that energy, $4.5 billion, was more than the cost of electricity used by all the color televisions in the U.S. in 2006, Curtis says.

The Department of Energy (DOE) reports that data centers consumed 1.5% of all electricity in the U.S. in 2006, and their power demand is growing 12% a year. If data centers’ present rate of consumption continues, Curtis warns, they will consume about 100 billion kWh of energy at an annual cost of $7.4 billion by 2011.

The federal government wants data centers’ energy consumption to be reduced by at least 10% by 2011. That translates into an energy savings equivalent to the electricity consumed by a million average U.S. households, according to Paul Sheathing, a spokesman for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

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