Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Does the Internet Have A Carbon Footprint?

One of the biggest users of electricity in the United States ?and Jonathan Koomey hates to tell you this ? but it?s you. Every time you log onto the Web.
AMBI 1 room tone Koomey
ACT 1 When people are thinking about the Internet, they normally think about the computer on the desk, but behind that computer is a whole bunch of computers, running the network. Those computers use electricity.

They use a LOT of electricity, says Koomey, a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist. The U-S Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2007, data centers used 61 billion kilowatt hours of electricity ? enough to run the entire state of Massachusetts for the year. And generating all that power, Koomey says, has big implications for our planet.
ACT 2 More than half of the electricity used in the United States is from coal. And coal?s one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, so every time you use a kilowatt hour of electricity, there are emissions from the power plants that go into the atmosphere and warm the globe.

Those high-tech centers that connect Internet and business networks, they have not been the most efficient users of electricity. In fact, says Koomey, half of the energy used by data centers doesn?t even go to servers - it goes to air conditioning, to cool those rooms full of servers. And those servers run around the clock, even when they?re not being used for anything.
AMBI 1 OUT
AMBI 2 server sound
Many of the servers in the U.S. are housed in huge server farms ? giant rooms or even warehouses crammed full of servers.
AMBI 2 server sound UP briefly
Walking the corridors of one of these data centers, like this one at Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, is like walking through a giant beehive, with information stored and moved around like honey.
AMBI 2 UP longer and UNDER
AMBI 3 You can audibly hear the difference with some of the higher density areas, where those in-row units are screaming at about 20 25 kilowatts of output?
That?s Brian Dey, who helped design this datacenter the size of a football field. He says Sun got rid of some old servers, consolidated the rest, designed air-conditioned spaces that are about twice as efficient as the industry average, and saved enough space to move from six buildings to two, Dey says. All of that resulted in huge energy - and cost - savings.
ACT 3 What we have overall is a 61 percent utility reduction. And that?s a little over a million bucks . A year.

Walking alongside Dey is Subodh Bapat, VP and engineer in the Eco-Responsibility wing of Sun. Bapat points out that, last year, top computer companies like Microsoft, Dell, Sun and Yahoo formed a consortium called Green Grid to find new ways to build and operate server farms with less electricity. The answer they came up with is threefold: Consolidate servers, to save energy and space; run the computers at a higher temperature so you?re not always blasting the A/C; and turn off servers that aren?t being used. All of these efforts, Bapat says, have become essential?. as companies are running out of money, running out of space - and, he says, even running out of electricity.
ACT 4 There isn?t any supply on the grid. Many utility companies are completely maxxed out. This is certainly true in Northern California.

AMBI 2 out
AMBI 4 room tone Yahoo
The large computing companies have been the first to take a big bite out of their energy use. Kevin Timmons, VP of operations for Yahoo, says virtualization, which is the new Silicon Valley buzzword for this, makes sense on just about every level.
ACT 5 It?s easy to care when it also makes good business sense. It?s good for our bottom line, it?s good for the environment, it?s good for the communities in which we do business.

AMBI 5 room tone H-P
The next step is to get the small- and medium-size companies to become more energy-efficient. And that?s where Brian Briett of Hewlett-Packard comes in. He makes house calls to companies in Silicon Valley, to get them on a lower-electricity diet. At one place he visited, he says, the servers were successfully consolidated from a roomful of 30 racks down to two. But no one told Facilities, Briett says, and those scaled-down servers stayed in one corner of the giant room. The very cold giant room.
ACT 6 Nobody ever thought to turn off the computer room air conditioning units. For years. So you had five massive air handlers going full tilt, enough to cool 20 racks, in this largely vacant room with 2 racks in it.

The size of data centers has expanded tenfold just about every year, says Subodh Bapat of Sun Micro. And they are beginning to use as much energy as the cities around them. But throughout the industry, he says the move to cut back on energy use has hit a tipping point? because companies can?t grow unless they become more efficient. So we will have more servers and more data centers in our future ? and we?ll need more electricity to run them. That will keep the pressure on to find ways to use that power more efficiently. For Quest, I?m David Gorn, KQED Radio News.