New Server Technology Reduces the Power Required to Save Energy

Knowing more about a situation can allow you to address it more efficiently. That’s one of the promises of the Internet of Things. Whether it’s the precision application of water and fertilizer in agriculture to a smart phone app that lets you adjust your thermostat at home if your plans change, knowledge becomes power saved so long as we have the means to act on that knowledge.

But all that energy-saving knowledge can take a lot of energy to store, distribute and access. In fact, data centers, which you can think of as the little men behind the curtain that we now know as “the cloud,” suck up a great deal of energy. In 2013, they consumed a staggering 91 billion kWh in the US alone. That’s enough to power every household in New York City. That amount is expected to grow by half again by 2020.

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Image credit: Andrew.T@NN: Flickr Creative Commons

RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post.