Electricity use in Information Technologies

05/02567 On the efficiency of US electricity usage since 1900

“…The rapid rate of increase in recent years is significant. Our estimate, while based on aggregated data, is roughly consistent with recent studies carried out by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the US Department of Energy [Norford et al 1990;Kawamoto et al 2002;Koomey et al 1992;Mitchell-Jackson et al 2003] …”

Office equipment energy use and trends

“…We use three parameters to characterize the operating data. The first is the average consumption factor (A), which is the average load when "on" as a percentage of the rated nameplate capacity (Norford et al, 1990). This is needed because rated power does not reflect how much power a system will draw on average.…”

“…The increase in desktop computing and printing has brought the excess heat generated from the machines into the office space. See Norford et al (1990) and Lovins and Heede (1990) for further discussion of this issue.…”

“…We've chosen round estimates to illustrate that these are rough values. The LBL estimate of "A" for PCs is based on direct measurements of a small sample of computers reported in Norford et al (1990). The diversity data are based on hourly component measurements of office equipment at a PG&E case study building, which showed that only half of the computers in the office area are typically "on" during daytime hours (Martin, 1991).…”

An Investigation of the Energy Consumption by Information Technology Equipments

“…Recently, energy consumption used by information technology (IT) equipment has become an interesting issue since the first ENERGY STAR specification for personal computers was released in the early 1990s [5]. The first detailed measurements of energy consumption for personal computers (PCs) together with an estimate of total electricity used by office equipment were reported in the late 1980s ( [3], [7], [9], [10], [14]). Often, the first step towards harnessing the power consumption in data centers, is to understand how energy is used in the data center.…”