04/02/09
SANTA MARIA - Each time you use the Internet, you may not think about how much energy it takes to deliver the information you need but, it's a huge drain on the power system.
The information you send or receive when you're online, needs to--at some point--pass through a data center.
Simply put, the buildings are huge energy hogs.
At a building up in San Francisco, which houses servers for some of the biggest names in cyberspace like, Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon.com, they're working to reduce the amount of power used.
Currently, all the data centers in the U.S. drain more electricity each day than all the television sets in America, combined.
And, that power trend is only growing.
P.G. & E. says it's seeing a doubling of data center energy use every five years.
Most of the power is used to operate giant coolers, used to keep the computers from overheating.
By simply insulating some of the pipes, one company has saved a full ten percent of its monthly energy bill.
That's a savings of nearly $25,000.
