Forget turning off the lights - shut down the friggin' computer

As people turn off the lights for Earth Hour this evening and ponder their electricity use, one of the world's most rapidly growing power guzzlers - for which nearly everyone carries responsibility - is largely hidden from view. It's the network of data centres and their servers that are the invisible backbone of the Internet. U.S. researcher Jonathan Koomey from California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done some of the most extensive calculations on electricity use at data centres, and estimated that they accounted for about 1 per cent of total world electricity consumption in 2005. More>