IP: computer and telecom centers get undeserved black eye for power usage

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> X-Sender: dpreed () mail reed com
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> Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 08:46:56 -0400
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
> Subject: computer and telecom centers get undeserved black eye for
>   power usage
>
> Dave - Perhaps you and IP readers might find the following 
> interesting.  The NYTimes has managed to find "experts" that seem to think 
> that the Internet can single handedly take down the power grid.  The only 
> problem is that no one seems to be checking their numbers...
> From NYTimes article by Jayson Blair (4/8/2001): "Con Edison engineers 
> say they have been taken aback by the fact that the 46 server farms have 
> asked for a minimum draw of 500 megawatts of electricity — roughly the 
> amount of power required by 500,000 homes."
>
> "The average data center consumes 60 to 100 kilowatts of electricity per 
> square foot, compared with 6 to 8 kilowatts per square foot in an average 
> commercial office building, said Tom Uhl, the project manager for Con 
> Edison's telecom hotel team."
>
> This appears to me to be BULLS**T.  It would be hard to stack computers 
> and routers densely enough so that a 1x1x8 foot volume consumed 100 kW of 
> electricity.  Of course, the access space for humans around the equipment 
> would have to be negligible as well, to achieve such densities in a building.
>
> What's interesting is that at the quoted numbers from Con Ed, even my 100 
> square foot office at Lotus would have been consuming 800 kW, being a 
> commercial office building.  I measured it back in 1988 for planning 
> reasons (our architects needed data on what a building full of developers 
> would need for power and A/C loads).  I had two massive PCs and 
> fluorescent lights in the office, plus some phones.  The consumption 
> during the workday was less than 400 W, or 0.4 kW, or a factor of 
> **2,000** times less than these engineers are quoting for "ordinary 
> commercial office space."  To get 100 kW/sq. foot like the telecom hotels, 
> they'd have to have the equivalent of about 1,200 1GHz PCs in that square 
> foot, or about 120,000 such PC's in a space equivalent to my office.
>
> Now I know that Air Conditioning adds a power load, but A/C is pretty 
> efficient, so I would presume that one could cool 1 Watt of equipment with 
> at most a couple of Watts of power to the A/C (and that's being 
> conservative).  So maybe one would only have to put 40,000 PC equivalents 
> in my old Lotus office to use that much power.
>
> Scaremongering at its best.  I hope that someone checks their math.
>
> Seems to me that these power engineers (or the data center hotel 
> architects/engineers) didn't do their homework.  Or else I'm really wrong.
>
>
>
> - David
> --------------------------------------------
> WWW Page: http://www.reed.com/dpr.html



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