PrimeEnergyIT: Supporting the market for energy efficient central IT

The dynamical development of IT performance in conjunction with an increasing utilization of IT services in all public and private sectors such as administration, health services and entertainment etc. is resulting in growing energy consumption of respective centralized IT equipment. EU and US studies (IEE E-Server project 2007, EPA 2007) have shown a strong increase of energy consumption of central IT-hardware and infrastructure during the last years. Experts agree that with continuous increase of data traffic a further and even more rapid increase of central IT energy consumption is very likely in the coming years. For EU-27 the energy consumption of central IT hardware and infrastructure (incl. servers, storage, network equipment, cooling) was calculated to 40TWh/year for 2007 which is equal to 1.5% of the EU electricity consumption. If business-as-usual is continued in the next years a doubling of energy consumption to 80 TWh/year is expected to occur by 2012 already and a further increase to 120TWh/year is estimated based on a trend extrapolation by 2015.