The Energy Efficiency Potential of Cloud-Based Software: A U.S. Case Study
Eric R. Masanet, Arman Shehabi, Jiaqi Liang, Lavanya Ramakrishnan, XiaoHui Ma, Valerie Hendrix, Benjamin Walker, Pradeep Kumar Mantha · 2013
The energy use of data centers is a topic that has received much attention, given that data centers currently account for 1-2% of global electricity use. However, cloud computing holds great potential to reduce data center energy demand moving forward, due to both large reductions in total servers through consolidation and large increases in facility efficiencies compared to traditional local data centers. However, analyzing the net energy implications of shifts to the cloud can be very difficult, because data center services can affect many different components of society’s economic and energy systems.