I’m posting this here becuase I’m realise that posting things to Linkedin means finding them again is a real pain, and having a link on my own domain is helpful for coming back to.
European datacentre usage
This chart is from pae 27 of the Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU report created for the European Commission, by Paolo Bertoldi, and George Kamiya.
It shows us three things:
- the total energy used by datacentres in 2022
- the total energy used by telecoms networks in 2022
- the share these both make up of total electricity use for the country
A few interesting things from this
We have three outliers where datacentres make up a disproportionate amount of power used in a country. Ireland is nearly 20%, and most of this comes from massive hyperscalers. Next is Denmark and Luxembourg at closer to 5%.
We also see that different countries have different power usage from networks. The report doesn’t try to give any real analysis why this is so different from country to country. Germany, France and Spain are large countries so it makes sense they might have large network usage. But it’s France is about the same size as Germany, and uses less power by comparison.