Technology companies try to go green by cutting the energy used by data centers - Brian Bergstein, The Associated Press

The extremely air-conditioned computer farms known as data centers are the gas-guzzling automobiles of the technology world. Some require 40 or 50 times more power than comparably sized office space. So with energy costs high and environmental friendliness making for good public relations, more technology companies are touting ways they are "greening" data centers, which serve up Web pages, swap Internet traffic, and process and store business information. But it is a lot easier to put out a news release than to build a data center with a significantly smaller environmental footprint. Even as efficiency improvements are reducing the energy used by many kinds of hardware, the industry's overall electricity consumption could double from 2006 to 2011 as demand grows.

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