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.
The companies had been able to reduce the power consumption of servers in particular, said bitkom vice president volker smid. Today, for example, they use less electricity when they are not working at full capacity. The air-conditioning of the data processing facilities has also become more efficient. Cooling and uninterruptible power supply account for around 40 percent of energy consumption in an average data center. Greener" components and construction methods should reduce electricity consumption by a further quarter, said smid.
Greenpeace had attacked cloud providers such as amazon, microsoft and apple in particular for allegedly using as much electricity as 180,000 single-family homes from "dirty" sources in some of their data centers. The environmental activists identified apple as the absolute leader in the use of electricity from coal and nuclear power. The cupertino-based company, however, disputed the claims. The consumption of the data center in north carolina calculated by greenpeace was far too high. By the end of 2012, apple will power its three cloud data centers in the u.S. Entirely from energy without coal-fired power. The plant in newark (california) will be powered by one hundred percent renewable energy sources.
Bitkom commissioned the study from the borderstep institute for innovation and sustainability in Berlin.