Energy Use and Air Emissions at Data Centers for Internet-based Companies are Focus of Investigative Series by New York Times in September 2012

In a series of long feature articles following a year-long investigation, The New York Times examined issues of energy use, energy efficiency, and air-pollutant emissions from back-up generators at data centers, the collections of computers (“servers”) that manage the enormous information-processing demands on popular Internet-based companies, such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon (which runs at least eight data centers in Ashburn, Manassas, and other northern Virginia sites, according to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the Times 9/22/12 article states—see p. 5).  The Times series asserts that some three million data centers worldwide use about 30 billion watts of energy, with energy use in the United States accounting for one-quarter to one-third of that amount.  The 9/22 article (p. 6) states that Dominion Virginia Power now provides about 500 million watts to data centers in its service area, and that load could increase to one billion watts by 2017.  Two installments of the series are the following: Power, pollution and the Internet, 9/22/12; and Data barns in a farm town, gobbling power and flexing muscle (about Quincy, Washington), 9/23/12.

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