BERLIN (dpa-AFX) – The data centers in Germany are becoming more and more efficient. Measured against the maximum power consumption of the installed hardware, the capacity grew by 84 percent from 2010 to 2020. Actual electricity consumption also increased, but not at the same pace because the energy efficiency of the systems has improved. These are the central results of a study presented on Tuesday by the Berlin Borderstep Institute, which was commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.
The energy requirements of data centers in Germany rose from 10.5 billion to 16 billion kilowatt hours in these ten years, which corresponds to an increase of 52.4 percent. Accordingly, the energy requirement accounts for 0.6 percent of the total energy consumption in Germany in 2020.
According to the study, the greenhouse gas emissions caused by data centers and smaller IT installations in Germany have been falling since 2018. With around 6 million tons of CO2, in 2020 they were again at the same level as in 2010. “The data center operators support the goal of the federal government, which provides for climate neutrality for all new data centers in Germany from 2027,” said Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder. “However, this can only succeed if sufficient electricity is available from renewable sources.”
Not only the number of systems and the servers and network components set up there have grown. According to calculations by Borderstep, the computing capacity installed in the data centers has almost quintupled per kilowatt hour of electricity consumed since 2010. The increase in capacity is mainly due to growth in cloud computing. More and more companies no longer operate their own data center, but obtain storage space and computing power via the Internet./chd/DP/ngu