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Some Internet companies now spend $50 million a year on electric power, and the total U.S. electric bill for keeping the Internet “live” has been estimated at $3.3 billion a year… “Typical loads for data centers today are 20 to 30 megawatts,” Fetzer said. “Some can be in excess of 50 megawatts.”

Recently I posted on one of Google’s new data centers located near low-cost hydroelectric power. As soon as I get some time I want to work out what a “typical Google query” consumes in terms of kilograms of coal [assuming the required electricity was supplied by a typical coal-fired utility]. It’s not easy to access the required data as Google is secretive about the operating parameters of its data centers.

Meanwhile, this short survey article from Site Selector gives us a few more facts on the magnitude of the electrical loads of the exponentially growing internet data centers.

…A typical Web search on Yahoo activates roughly 7,000 or more computers, eating up chunks of electricity at a time – electricity needed to both power the search and to cool the thousands of servers doing the searching.

Some Internet companies now spend $50 million a year on electric power, and the total U.S. electric bill for keeping the Internet “live” has been estimated at $3.3 billion a year.

Even though the microprocessors inside the servers are becoming more efficient, the data centers themselves are becoming more power- hungry. “Typical loads for data centers today are 20 to 30 megawatts,” Fetzer said. “Some can be in excess of 50 megawatts.”

…The result, she added, is that major players such as Google are now turning to rural markets and second- and third- tier cities when they have to build new data centers. New hot markets for these centers are Quincy, Wash.; The Dalles, Oregon; Manassas, Va.; and tier- two cities in Canada, Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska and Georgia.

“Communities anticipating Internet business growth need to accelerate time frames with permitting and power capacity,” noted Fetzer. “In the next six to 12 months, data centers will need large- capacity electrical circuits, lower rates due to volume and load factor, partners and consortiums to engineer new solutions, and green solutions.”

Without those innovative solutions, she said, the growth of the Internet could slow. “It became apparent in the late 1990s that data centers were becoming power hogs. This has always been an issue since the early days of the Internet.”

What’s changed is that the electric bill for powering the Internet has now come due.

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