So who's right?
In the debate over power demand and the Internet, data centers are often exhibit No. 1. These facilities, also known as "server farms" or "telco hotels," consume vast amounts of electricity. With power concentrations of 100 watts per square foot, a 10,000-square-foot data center can demand as much power as 1,000 homes. But unlike homeowners who turn their lights off when they leave for vacation, data centres require full power 24/7.
In Seattle, a raft of new data centres is forcing the city to scramble to meet their needs. Over the next 24 months, the city's utility company expects a handful of data centres to raise its average daily demand by about 250 megawatts, an increase of nearly 25 percent over current loads. Other regions, including the San Francisco Bay and Chicago areas, are also facing power supply problems caused, in part, by data centres.
Little doubt remains that electricity usage is rising. Until recently, the EIA was projecting that domestic power demand would rise 1.3 percent through 2020. But in late November, the agency increased its forecast by 38 percent, to an annual growth rate of 1.8 percent, citing higher-than-projected economic growth and a "re-evaluation of the potential for growth in electricity use for a variety of residential and commercial appliances and equipment, including personal computers."
Although the EIA listed computers as a possible reason for the increase, economists and energy analysts cannot say with certainty why electricity usage is increasing, how fast it will grow or even the best way to meet that new demand. Nor is it clear how much of that growth is caused by Internet-related facilities, such as data centres.
Some experts, like Taub, believe that much of the growth is the result of the "wealth effect." Americans are making more money, so they are buying more gadgets that use electricity. In addition, people are buying bigger houses that require more lighting, air conditioning and other comforts that require lots of power. And as the American economy grows, more companies are launched, more stores and offices are built and, thus, more electricity is consumed.
Mills agreed that the wealth effect plays a role, but he firmly believes data centers will increase consumption. "When we get tens of millions of square feet of data centers, the power supply problem is going to be more acute," Mills predicted.
In fact, the two sides find some common ground when it comes to power consumption by data centers. Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley, has calculated that by 2005, data centers could be consuming slightly more than 1 percent of all electricity in the U.S. Koomey based his projection on a report written earlier this year by Richard Juarez, a senior Internet analyst at Robertson Stephens, who predicted that 50 million square feet of data centres would be online by that time.
Juarez's estimate may be conservative. On Dec. 12, IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Lou Gerstner announced that Big Blue will build 50 new data centers to meet the growing demand for the outsourcing of information technology services.
Still, Koomey and energy efficiency experts such as Amory Lovins, CEO for research at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, believe that Huber and Mills drastically overestimated overall demand from the Internet. For one thing, they said, the two erred in estimating that each computer now on the Internet uses 1,000 watts of power. In reality, the average desktop unit and monitor use about 150 watts. When in sleep mode, they said, that figure drops to 50 watts or less. Laptops are even more efficient, with some newer models using less than 30 watts.
Furthermore, they charged that Huber and Mills are carrying coal for the mining and utility industries. Last year, a day after the Forbes article appeared, the Greening Earth Society, a group financed primarily by companies that mine, transport and burn coal, published a report authored by Mills titled The Internet Begins with Coal. One of the Greening Earth Society's primary objectives is to cast doubt on the science behind global warming theories and to promote the message that "the Earth is actually getting greener thanks to increasing CO2 levels."
Huber and Mills are the co-editors of the Huber-Mills Digital Power Report newsletter, which is published by the Gilder Technology Group, the company headed by George Gilder.
In their Forbes article, Huber and Mills predicted that the "infoelectric convergence" would result in a massive increase in energy use.
Moving 2 megabytes of data on the Net, they said, requires the energy equivalent of 1 pound of coal. And with hundreds of millions of new digital devices, ranging from digital X-ray machines to Palm handheld computers, getting plugged in, the future of our economy depends on burning more fossil fuels, including coal, which produces 56 percent of the electricity used in America. All those Net-related electronics consume "up to 290 billion kWh [kilowatt-hours] of demand. That's about 8 percent of total U.S. demand," they wrote.
"Add in the electric power used to build and operate stand-alone [unnetworked] chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13 percent. It's now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital Internet economy within the next decade."
