A report from Northbridge Energy Partners examines the increasing demands of data centers and the limitations of power grids.
The report, which was written by Peter Kelly-Detwiler, says that demand is growing both in terms of storage and processing. This has led to more super computer data center and high performance computers. Indeed, the amount of energy used by data centers had grown to 3 percent of all electricity used, which is an increase of 100 percent during the past five years.
As time passes, downtime will become more costly, which will put more focus on the power grid to be reliable. However, datacenter efficiency efforts are unlikely to keep pace with the growing demands. One innovation that can help, at least to some extent, is modular data centers. These structures can be added on an as-needed basis. They are cooled in a more flexible and efficient manner than traditional datacenters, which leads to savings.
