RE: TC interview - Very good!24 Aug 2020 20:21
Hi Muktass found this a while back regarding Data Centres
"Data centres use lots of power. And this is why: Firstly, data centres support and enable service
economies in the way that heavy industries supported manufacturing economies so you should expect some
energy intensive activity to be taking place. Secondly, data centres represent the consolidation of computing
demand. This means they are super-concentrating lots of activities that individually are not very energy
intensive but when consolidated become extremely energy intensive simply because of the degree to which
they are concentrated. Thirdly, data centres use power in two ways: they need power to run the IT
equipment that they house (ie servers which execute the digital transactions that we rely on) and, because
servers emit heat when they are working1
, they need power to keep those servers cool enough to function
reliably (see point 2 below). A very large data centre may consume 30GWh of power in a year, costing its
operator around £3,000,000 for electricity alone. A handful of sites in the UK consume even more than this
although the majority of sites consume far less. The total power demand of the UK data centre sector is
between 2-3TWh per year2
. Energy is usually the largest single element of operating costs for data centres,
varying from 25-60%.