electricity Archives

Bigger GDP, Smaller Carbon Footprint

By Econ70 | 08/23/2012

While GDP grew by 1.8% in ’11, carbon emissions fell by 2.4% and total energy consumption fell by 0.5%. Better yet, since ‘90, GDP has risen 66% while carbon emissions have risen just 9%! A major reason for this is the large decline in coal’s share of electricity generation, from 53% in ’90 to 43%…

Chilling at Google

By Econ70 | 01/19/2012

Server farms need lots of energy to cool servers. In ’10 cooling server farms consumed 1.5% of global electricity, and may jump to as much as 5% by ’17 as internet traffic continues to explode. With this in mind, Google just opened a data center in Hamina Finland where the average temperature is 35 degrees,…