Why Data Centers Can’t Save Energy

The Department of Energy is asking for industry input on where it should place future research and development priorities in reducing data center energy consumption. It has much to learn–and much to teach.

For the immediate future, the DOE should de-emphasize improvements to facility technology as “the” solution. We already know a lot, and users aren’t paying much attention. Working to make facility components marginally more efficient, when the driver of data center power consumption is the increasing numbers of servers and storage, misses the root cause of data center energy consumption growth.


The DOE should focus on why users are not implementing existing energy efficiency ideas. The current arguments for data center energy efficiency appear to be economically compelling, yet little has happened. Why? This is a sociological issue, and perhaps it is outside normal research parameters. But something systemically is wrong when users are either ignorant (hard to believe) or ignore the opportunity for significant financial savings.

Conducting research into why CFOs and CIOs are not demanding increased energy efficiency is imperative. Is there a countervailing economic or productivity argument that overwhelms energy efficiency? Alternatively, if users are ignorant, how can data center energy efficiency arguments be re-formulated to break through the clutter of what appears to be unimportant or conflicting information?

Forbes