100MW Data Center era

According to foreign media reports, the current data center needs more than 100MW of electricity, which is equivalent to about 80,000 U.S. households consumption.

While most Internet companies do not disclose the details of their facilities ' energy consumption, according to Greenpeace estimates, the company's data center in North Carolina is estimated to require 100MW of power, with Google estimated to be 60MW to 100MW at the time of completion of the second phase of the data center in North Carolina. Facebook's data center in North Carolina is estimated to consume 40MW.

Large coal-fired power plants, even a truly large solar thermal power plant, can produce 500 megawatts of electricity. As a result, a 100MW data center consumes most of the electricity generated from a large power plant.

In its last report, Greenpeace explained: In North Carolina, these internet companies ' new data centers are among the least resource-efficient places in the region, with 61% of the electricity consumed from coal and 30.8% from nuclear power generation. Only 4% of the electricity comes from renewables.

All these figures show that the internet has become an energy-intensive industry, with more and more people spending more time surfing the internet, which will require more energy. The growth in energy consumption in data centers has slowed in recent years, as Jonathan Koomey said in a keynote report last year that the power growth used by the US data center has been reduced from 56% in 2005 to 36% in 2010.

In 2010, the data center used 1.3% of the world's total electricity and 2% of the electricity in the United States. Environmental agencies predict electricity consumption in the US will grow to 120,000-kilowatt by the end of 2011, the equivalent of 25 large power plants.

At the same time, internet companies are beginning to consciously make data centers more energy efficient, and some even invest a lot of money to use clean energy. For example, Apple has built a solar project near its data center in North Carolina, and Facebook and Google are actively using external air cooling to cut some of their data center's cooling power needs.