However, energy consumption has fallen overall, primarily due to the economic crisis. The environmental protection organization greenpeace recently attacked major IT companies in a recent campaign. The association criticized the enormous amounts of energy consumed by its cloud data centers, especially coal and nuclear power.

According to bitkom, the number of servers in germany rose by 7 percent to 2.3 million between 2008 and 2011, while energy consumption fell by 4 percent to 9.7 twh. All the data centers and servers would need the power of four medium-size coal-fired power plants, the association calculated. IT systems accounted for 1.8 percent of total electricity consumption in germany.