Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Going Green
Going green is clearly in fashion these days. Climate change is a constant headline in our media, and Al Gore has been elevated to the equivalent of a rock star. Congressional talk about carbon taxes has gained momentum, and individual states have pledged zero carbon targets. Not to be left out of the mix is the IT world with its rapid proliferation of data centers, servers and energy consumption. Consider these facts about the state of IT infrastructure today. In 2006, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 61 billion kilowatt-hours.
(kWh) of energy, which accounted for about 1.5 percent of the total electricity consumed in the U.S. that year. The total cost of that energy consumption was $4.5 billion, which is more than the electricity consumed by all color televisions in the country and is equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 5.8 million average U.S. households. If the status quo continues, by 2011, data centers will consume 100 billion kWh of energy, at a total annual cost of $7.4 billion.
Those levels of power consumption would also necessitate the construction of 10 additional power plants. As we all know, power plants produce carbon dioxide as they burn fossil fuels. In the United States, a power plant generates approximately 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. At current projections of infrastructure capacity expansion, that’s an …
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