With Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) announcing rebates for customers who adopt virtualization in their data centers, VMware has been receiving a lot of press in regards to the environmental aspects of with solutions. I recently watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Watching this scared me a little, but it also made be glad I’m working with virtualization technologies.

Here’s scary facts I scared up this morning:

49.7% of all Electricity Generated in 2005 was from Coal!

Coal emits nearly 2 times as much carbon as Natural Gas and 125% more than oil.

93% of Carbon Dioxide emissions from electrical generation.

In 2005 the US generated over 4,054,688,000 megawatts of electricity, of which 2,013,179,000 was from coal.

Now turn and look at your data center. Consider the total kWh that’s being consumed in there. Imaging those kWh in terms of CO2 and soot generation. Nearly 50% of the power they are consuming is coming from the worst possible source, COAL!

So how much of the US’s power consumption is from data centers? I haven’t found any numbers online, but I’m apparently not the only one. President Bush recently signed a law that would study data center power usage. This is great news, especially from a President who’s administration and Republican Party associates have tried so hard to distort the truth about environmental issues like global warming.

So this makes virtualization technologies like VMware not only technically and financially smart, but now environmental.

 

Source: US Energy Information Administration