A new report, released today from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is reporting that electricity consumption by data centers nationwide, after rising rapidly for more than a decade, started to plateau in 2010 and has remained steady since, at just under 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.

The report is titled, “United States Data Center Energy Usage Report,” declared to be first comprehensive energy analysis of data centers in nearly 10 years.

Projected Data Center Total Electricity Use – Estimates include energy used for servers, storage, network equipment, and infrastructure in all U.S. data centers. The solid line represents historical estimates from 2000-2014 and the dashed lines represent five projection scenarios through 2020; Current Trends, Improved Management (IM), Best Practices (BP), Hyperscale Shift (HS), and the static 2010 Energy Efficiency counterfactual. (Source: Berkeley Lab)

Some highlights:

— Arman Shehabi, one of the lead authors of the report: “Over that decade, the amount of energy savings is about 620 billion kilowatt-hours, or more than $60 billion, thanks to efficient practices.”

— “The Berkeley Lab authors of the new report, including Dale Sartor, Sarah Smith, Richard Brown, and Magnus Herrlin, several of whom also worked on the 2008 report, collected data on shipments of servers and storage, networking, and other equipment and then built a model to project data center energy consumption.”

— “Overall, they found that the larger data centers have made significant advances in operating more efficiently. At the same time, smaller data centers, which are not increasing in number but still projected to account for 60 percent of all data center energy use in 2020, are still often inefficient.”

Today’s announcement: http://1.usa.gov/28Z2Xuf / The report: http://1.usa.gov/291v0wo