San Diego Union-Tribune California venture capitalists and the Obama administration spent, collectively, $30 billion, over the past four years on energy tech investments to replace oil, coal and natural gas. Odds are that won’t happen again.
Global data center traffic is firmly in the zettabyte era and will nearly quadruple from 2011 to reach 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016." — Cisco Global Cloud Index, October 2012 We thought the Internet was already huge.
The Washington Examiner Who would have predicted that one of the most contentious issues in the 2012 presidential campaign would be which candidate is more bullish about coal, oil and natural gas?
"The [2012] survey showed a massive increase [in data center power requirements] over the last twelve months of 63.3% globally to 38 gigawatts (GW) with a further 17% forecast for 2013." DatacenterDynamics 2012 survey Imagine what might happen when real growth returns.
“As the use of the Internet continues to grow and massive computing facilities are demanding that performance keep doubling, devoting corresponding increases in the nation’s electrical energy capacity to computing may become too expensive.” [National Academy of Sciences] A central tenet of nearly all Internet energy forecasts is that there will continue to be improvements…
“Welcome to EARTH — a highly ambitious [European Union] … project, investigating the energy efficiency of mobile communication systems." … Mobile telecommunication networks are increasingly contributing to global energy consumption. So, does efficiency, less energy per unit of traffic, cut demand?